brief biography of napoleon bonaparte

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Napoleon Bonaparte

By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 24, 2023 | Original: November 9, 2009

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), also known as Napoleon I, was a French military leader and emperor who conquered much of Europe in the early 19th century. Born on the island of Corsica, Napoleon rapidly rose through the ranks of the military during the French Revolution (1789-1799). After seizing political power in France in a 1799 coup d’état, he crowned himself emperor in 1804. Shrewd, ambitious and a skilled military strategist, Napoleon successfully waged war against various coalitions of European nations and expanded his empire. However, after a disastrous French invasion of Russia in 1812, Napoleon abdicated the throne two years later and was exiled to the island of Elba. In 1815, he briefly returned to power in his Hundred Days campaign. After a crushing defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, he abdicated once again and was exiled to the remote island of Saint Helena, where he died at 51.

Napoleon’s Education and Early Military Career

Napoleon Bonaparte was born on August 15, 1769, in Ajaccio, on the Mediterranean island of Corsica. He was the second of eight surviving children born to Carlo Buonaparte (1746-1785), a lawyer, and Letizia Romalino Buonaparte (1750-1836). Although his parents were members of the minor Corsican nobility, the family was not wealthy. The year before Napoleon’s birth, France acquired Corsica from the city-state of Genoa, Italy. Napoleon later adopted a French spelling of his last name.

As a boy, Napoleon attended school in mainland France, where he learned the French language, and went on to graduate from a French military academy in 1785. He then became a second lieutenant in an artillery regiment of the French army. The French Revolution began in 1789, and within three years revolutionaries had overthrown the monarchy and proclaimed a French republic. During the early years of the revolution, Napoleon was largely on leave from the military and home in Corsica, where he became affiliated with the Jacobins, a pro-democracy political group. In 1793, following a clash with the nationalist Corsican governor, Pasquale Paoli (1725-1807), the Bonaparte family fled their native island for mainland France, where Napoleon returned to military duty.

In France, Napoleon became associated with Augustin Robespierre (1763-1794), the brother of revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794), a Jacobin who was a key force behind the Reign of Terror (1793-1794), a period of violence against enemies of the revolution. During this time, Napoleon was promoted to the rank of brigadier general in the army. However, after Robespierre fell from power and was guillotined (along with Augustin) in July 1794, Napoleon was briefly put under house arrest for his ties to the brothers.

In 1795, Napoleon helped suppress a royalist insurrection against the revolutionary government in Paris and was promoted to major general.

Did you know? In 1799, during Napoleon’s military campaign in Egypt, a French soldier named Pierre Francois Bouchard (1772-1832) discovered the Rosetta Stone. This artifact provided the key to cracking the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics, a written language that had been dead for almost 2,000 years.

Napoleon’s Rise to Power

Since 1792, France’s revolutionary government had been engaged in military conflicts with various European nations. In 1796, Napoleon commanded a French army that defeated the larger armies of Austria, one of his country’s primary rivals, in a series of battles in Italy. In 1797, France and Austria signed the Treaty of Campo Formio, resulting in territorial gains for the French.

The following year, the Directory, the five-person group that had governed France since 1795, offered to let Napoleon lead an invasion of England. Napoleon determined that France’s naval forces were not yet ready to go up against the superior British Royal Navy. Instead, he proposed an invasion of Egypt in an effort to wipe out British trade routes with India. Napoleon’s troops scored a victory against Egypt’s military rulers, the Mamluks, at the Battle of the Pyramids in July 1798; soon, however, his forces were stranded after his naval fleet was nearly decimated by the British at the Battle of the Nile in August 1798. In early 1799, Napoleon’s army launched an invasion of Ottoman Empire -ruled Syria , which ended with a failed siege of Acre, located in modern-day Israel . That summer, with the political situation in France marked by uncertainty, the ever-ambitious and cunning Napoleon opted to abandon his army in Egypt and return to France.

The Coup of 18 Brumaire

In November 1799, in an event known as the coup of 18 Brumaire, Napoleon was part of a group that successfully overthrew the French Directory.

The Directory was replaced with a three-member Consulate, and 5'7" Napoleon became first consul, making him France’s leading political figure. In June 1800, at the Battle of Marengo, Napoleon’s forces defeated one of France’s perennial enemies, the Austrians, and drove them out of Italy. The victory helped cement Napoleon’s power as first consul. Additionally, with the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, the war-weary British agreed to peace with the French (although the peace would only last for a year).

Napoleon worked to restore stability to post-revolutionary France. He centralized the government; instituted reforms in such areas as banking and education; supported science and the arts; and sought to improve relations between his regime and the pope (who represented France’s main religion, Catholicism), which had suffered during the revolution. One of his most significant accomplishments was the Napoleonic Code , which streamlined the French legal system and continues to form the foundation of French civil law to this day.

In 1802, a constitutional amendment made Napoleon first consul for life. Two years later, in 1804, he crowned himself emperor of France in a lavish ceremony at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.

Napoleon’s Marriages and Children

In 1796, Napoleon married Josephine de Beauharnais (1763-1814), a stylish widow six years his senior who had two teenage children. More than a decade later, in 1809, after Napoleon had no offspring of his own with Empress Josephine, he had their marriage annulled so he could find a new wife and produce an heir. In 1810, he wed Marie Louise (1791-1847), the daughter of the emperor of Austria. The following year, she gave birth to their son, Napoleon François Joseph Charles Bonaparte (1811-1832), who became known as Napoleon II and was given the title king of Rome. In addition to his son with Marie Louise, Napoleon had several illegitimate children.

The Reign of Napoleon I

From 1803 to 1815, France was engaged in the Napoleonic Wars, a series of major conflicts with various coalitions of European nations. In 1803, partly as a means to raise funds for future wars, Napoleon sold France’s Louisiana Territory in North America to the newly independent United States for $15 million, a transaction that later became known as the Louisiana Purchase .

In October 1805, the British wiped out Napoleon’s fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar . However, in December of that same year, Napoleon achieved what is considered to be one of his greatest victories at the Battle of Austerlitz, in which his army defeated the Austrians and Russians. The victory resulted in the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and the creation of the Confederation of the Rhine.

Beginning in 1806, Napoleon sought to wage large-scale economic warfare against Britain with the establishment of the so-called Continental System of European port blockades against British trade. In 1807, following Napoleon’s defeat of the Russians at Friedland in Prussia, Alexander I (1777-1825) was forced to sign a peace settlement, the Treaty of Tilsit. In 1809, the French defeated the Austrians at the Battle of Wagram, resulting in further gains for Napoleon.

During these years, Napoleon reestablished a French aristocracy (eliminated in the French Revolution) and began handing out titles of nobility to his loyal friends and family as his empire continued to expand across much of western and central continental Europe.

Napoleon’s Downfall and First Abdication

In 1810, Russia withdrew from the Continental System. In retaliation, Napoleon led a massive army into Russia in the summer of 1812. Rather than engaging the French in a full-scale battle, the Russians adopted a strategy of retreating whenever Napoleon’s forces attempted to attack. As a result, Napoleon’s troops trekked deeper into Russia despite being ill-prepared for an extended campaign.

In September, both sides suffered heavy casualties in the indecisive Battle of Borodino. Napoleon’s forces marched on to Moscow, only to discover almost the entire population evacuated. Retreating Russians set fires across the city in an effort to deprive enemy troops of supplies. After waiting a month for a surrender that never came, Napoleon, faced with the onset of the Russian winter, was forced to order his starving, exhausted army out of Moscow. During the disastrous retreat, his army suffered continual harassment from a suddenly aggressive and merciless Russian army. Of Napoleon’s 600,000 troops who began the campaign, only an estimated 100,000 made it out of Russia.

At the same time as the catastrophic Russian invasion, French forces were engaged in the Peninsular War (1808-1814), which resulted in the Spanish and Portuguese, with assistance from the British, driving the French from the Iberian Peninsula. This loss was followed in 1813 by the Battle of Leipzig , also known as the Battle of Nations, in which Napoleon’s forces were defeated by a coalition that included Austrian, Prussian, Russian and Swedish troops. Napoleon then retreated to France, and in March 1814 coalition forces captured Paris.

On April 6, 1814, Napoleon, then in his mid-40s, was forced to abdicate the throne. With the Treaty of Fontainebleau, he was exiled to Elba, a Mediterranean island off the coast of Italy. He was given sovereignty over the small island, while his wife and son went to Austria.

HISTORY Vault: Napoleon Bonaparte: The Glory of France

Explore the extraordinary life and times of Napoleon Bonaparte, the great military genius who took France to unprecedented heights of power, and then brought it to its knees when his ego spun out of control.

Hundred Days Campaign and Battle of Waterloo

On February 26, 1815, after less than a year in exile, Napoleon escaped Elba and sailed to the French mainland with a group of more than 1,000 supporters. On March 20, he returned to Paris, where he was welcomed by cheering crowds. The new king, Louis XVIII (1755-1824), fled, and Napoleon began what came to be known as his Hundred Days campaign.

Upon Napoleon’s return to France, a coalition of allies–the Austrians, British, Prussians and Russians–who considered the French emperor an enemy began to prepare for war. Napoleon raised a new army and planned to strike preemptively, defeating the allied forces one by one before they could launch a united attack against him.

In June 1815, his forces invaded Belgium, where British and Prussian troops were stationed. On June 16, Napoleon’s troops defeated the Prussians at the Battle of Ligny. However, two days later, on June 18, at the Battle of Waterloo near Brussels, the French were crushed by the British, with assistance from the Prussians.

On June 22, 1815, Napoleon was once again forced to abdicate.

Napoleon’s Final Years

In October 1815, Napoleon was exiled to the remote, British-held island of Saint Helena, in the South Atlantic Ocean. He died there on May 5, 1821, at age 51, most likely from stomach cancer. (During his time in power, Napoleon often posed for paintings with his hand in his vest, leading to some speculation after his death that he had been plagued by stomach pain for years.) Napoleon was buried on the island despite his request to be laid to rest “on the banks of the Seine, among the French people I have loved so much.” In 1840, his remains were returned to France and entombed in a crypt at Les Invalides in Paris, where other French military leaders are interred.

Napoleon Bonaparte Quotes

• “The only way to lead people is to show them a future: a leader is a dealer in hope.”
• “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
• “Envy is a declaration of inferiority.”
• “The reason most people fail instead of succeed is they trade what they want most for what they want at the moment.”
• “If you wish to be a success in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing.”

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Napoleon Bonaparte

French military general Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself the first emperor of France in 1804. His Napoleonic Code remains a model for governments worldwide.

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Latest News: Napoleon Movie in Theaters Now

Napoleon has received some flack for its historical inaccuracies , such as showing the titular character shooting at pyramids. “If you want to really understand Napoleon, then you should probably do your own studying and reading,” Phoenix previously told Empire magazine . “Because if you see this film, it’s this experience told through Ridley’s eyes... What we were after was something that would capture the feeling of this man.”

Quick Facts

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French General Napoleon Bonaparte was one of the world’s greatest military leaders who became the first emperor of France, from 1804 to 1815. Born on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, he attended military schools in France and eventually embraced his adopted home. Bonaparte steadily rose to power in the tumult of the French Revolution before seizing power in a 1799 coup. He was elected consul for life in 1802, then proclaimed the French emperor two years later. As a political leader, Bonaparte broadly transformed French society, most notably ushering in the Napoleonic Code that still serves as the basis of civil codes around the world today. During the Napoleonic Wars, the famed military tactician expanded France’s footprint before a string of critical losses forced him into exile. Bonaparte spent the final years of his life on the remote island of St. Helena, where he died in 1821 at age 51.

FULL NAME: Napoleon Bonaparte BORN: August 15, 1769 DIED: May 5, 1821 BIRTHPLACE: Ajaccio, Corsica SPOUSES: Josephine de Beauharnais (1796-1809) and Archduchess Marie-Louise (1810-1821) CHILDREN: Charles, Alexandre, and Napoleon II ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Leo HEIGHT: 5 ft. 7 in.

Napoleon Bonaparte was born Napoleone Buonaparte in Ajaccio, on the French island of Corsica, on August 15, 1769. He was the fourth, and second surviving, child of Carlo Buonaparte, a lawyer, and his wife, Letizia Ramolino. Napoleon eventually had seven surviving siblings.

Around the time of Napoleon’s birth, the French’s occupation of Corsica had drawn considerable local resistance. Napoleon’s father had at first supported the nationalists, siding with their leader, Pasquale Paoli. But after Paoli was forced to flee the island, Carlo switched his allegiance to the French. After doing so, he was appointed assessor of the judicial district of Ajaccio in 1771, a plush job that eventually enabled him to enroll his two sons, Joseph and Napoleon, in France’s College d’Autun.

In 1779, young Napoleon began attending the military college of Brienne, where he studied for five years. He excelled as a student yet struggled to fit in with his classmates who were the children of French nobles and bullied Napoleon for being a foreigner.

At age 15, Napoleon moved on to the military academy in Paris. While Napoleon was still there, his father died of stomach cancer in 1785. This propelled Napoleon to take the reins as the head of the family. Graduating early from the military academy, Napoleon, now second lieutenant of artillery, returned to Corsica in 1786.

Back home, Napoleon got behind the Corsican resistance to the French occupation, siding with his father’s former ally, Pasquale Paoli. But the two soon had a falling out, and when a civil war in Corsica began in April 1793, Napoleon—now an enemy of Paoli—and his family relocated to France, where they assumed the French version of their name: Bonaparte.

Napoleon stood about 5 feet, 7 inches tall, making him slightly taller than the average Frenchman of his time.

Much has been made of Napoleon’s height, and legends claim that he was unusually short, giving rise to the term “Napoleon complex,” an inferiority complex sometimes associated with people of short stature. Some historians attribute the myths about Napoleon’s height to British propaganda.

Napoleon’s return to France began with a service with the French military, where he rejoined his regiment at Nice in June 1793. The turmoil of the French Revolution , which began four years prior, created opportunities for ambitious military leaders like Napoleon. The young leader quickly showed his support for the Jacobins, a far-left political movement and the most well-known and popular political club from the French Revolution.

A year after France was declared a republic, King Louis XVI was executed in January 1793. Ultimately, these acts led to the rise of Maximilien de Robespierre and what became, essentially, the dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety. The years of 1793 and 1794 came to be known as the Reign of Terror , in which as many as 40,000 people were killed. Eventually, the Jacobins fell from power, and Robespierre was executed.

Trusted Military Leader

In 1795, the French revolutionary government known as the Directory took control of the country. Napoleon, who had previously fallen out of favor with Robespierre, came into the good graces of the Directory that same year after he saved the government from counter-revolutionary forces. For his efforts, Napoleon was soon named commander of the Army of the Interior. In addition, he was a trusted advisor to the Directory on military matters.

In 1796, Napoleon took the helm of the Army of Italy, a post he’d been coveting. The army—just 30,000 strong, disgruntled, and underfed—was soon turned around by the young military commander. Under his direction, the reinvigorated army won numerous crucial victories against the Austrians, greatly expanded the French empire, and squashed an internal threat by the royalists, who wished to return France to a monarchy. All of these successes helped make Napoleon the military’s brightest star.

Failed Egypt Campaign

On July 1, 1798, Napoleon and his army traveled to the Middle East to undermine Great Britain’s empire by occupying Egypt and disrupting English trade routes to India. But his military campaign proved disastrous: On August 1, Admiral Horatio Nelson’s fleet decimated Napoleon’s forces in the Battle of the Nile.

Napoleon’s image and that of France were greatly harmed by the loss, and in a show of newfound confidence against the commander, Britain, Austria, Russia, and Turkey formed a new coalition against France. In the spring of 1799, French armies were defeated in Italy, forcing France to give up much of the peninsula. That October, Napoleon returned to France as his troops continued fighting.

Coup of 18 Brumaire

Shortly after his return to France, Napoleon participated in an event known as the Coup of 18 Brumaire. The bloodless coup d’etat, heavily orchestrated by Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, overthrew the newly Jacobin-controlled Directory on November 9, 1799. Napoleon and Sieyès ushered in a new government called the Consulate to be led by three members—themselves and Pierre-Roger Ducos. Napoleon’s brother Lucien Bonaparte also assisted the cause.

When Napoleon was named first consul, he became France’s leading political figure in a position that amounted to nothing less than a dictatorship. Under the new guidelines, the first consul was permitted to appoint ministers, generals, civil servants, magistrates, and even members of the legislative assemblies. Sieyès and Ducos were reduced to figureheads. In February 1800, the new constitution was easily accepted.

At the Battle of Marengo in June 1800, Napoleon’s forces defeated the Austrians and drove them from the Italian peninsula. This military victory cemented Napoleon’s authority as first consul.

Napoleon proceeded to transform France’s economy, legal and educational systems, and even the Church, as he reinstated Roman Catholicism as the state religion through the Concordat of 1801. He also negotiated a European peace, partially through the 1802 Treaty of Amiens that struck a (short-lived) truce with the war-weary British.

His reforms proved popular: In 1802, he was elected consul for life, and two years later, he was proclaimed emperor of France on May 18, 1804. He was officially crowned Napoleon I during his coronation at Notre Dame Cathedral on December 2 of that year.

As Napoleon was rising in the ranks, his personal life was also taking shape. He met Josephine de Beauharnais, the widow of General Alexandre de Beauharnais (guillotined during the Reign of Terror) and a mother of two children, at a party in 1795. He was quickly smitten and despite her initial reservations— Josephine described Napoleon as “altogether strange in all his person”—they married on March 9, 1796, in a civil ceremony.

Their union was tempestuous from the outset, with Napoleon’s military campaigns forcing him away from home for long periods. Although he often complimented Josephine in letters from the battlefield, both of them engaged in extramarital affairs. Napoleon had at least two children out of wedlock—Charles Léon Denuelle in 1806 and Alexandre Walewski in 1810.

Josephine was known for holding lavish parties and spending money on clothing and property, including the Malmaison estate near Paris in 1799. Despite their arguments, the two stayed together as Josephine maintained a positive perception among the public. When Napoleon crowned himself emperor in 1804, he insisted upon placing a crown upon Empress Josephine as well.

Despite his new title, not all was going to plan for Napoleon. He faced mounting pressure from his family to separate from Josephine, who was in her 40s by this point, because she was unable to give him a legitimate son and, thus, an heir. So in December 1809, Napoleon arranged for the annulment of their marriage.

Following the annulment, Napoleon searched in haste for a new bride. His first choice was Anna Pavlovna, the 15-year-old sister of Russian Tsar Alexander I. But after delays and excuses, he instead selected Archduchess Marie-Louise of Austria, 18, due largely to political motivations. Marie-Louise was the great-niece of Marie Antoinette . She dreaded the idea , writing in her diary that just looking at Napoleon would be the “worst form of torture.” However, she complied and married Napoleon by proxy in a civil ceremony in March 1810.

Marie-Louise gave Napoleon the heir he desired, as the couple had a son—Napoleon II, King of Rome—on March 20, 1811.

Despite his marriage to Marie-Louise, Napoleon continued his correspondence with Josephine and made unannounced personal visits to Malmaison. In 1813, he even brought his young son to meet her, as their struggle to produce an heir “had cost her so many tears.” This stoked jealousy in Marie-Louise, who remained married to Napoleon until his death.

Continuing the societal reforms he made, Napoleon instituted the Napoleonic Code, otherwise known as the French Civil Code, on March 21, 1804. The sweeping set of laws ended the feudal system and addressed property rights, family law, and individual freedoms. It forbade privileges based on birth, declaring all men to be equal and stating that government jobs must be given to the most qualified. Men were entitled to religious freedom and placed in charge of the women and children in their families. Women were largely left without rights, though they did have limited liberties in divorce proceedings.

The Napoleonic Code applied in France and its growing number of territories. Napoleon correctly predicted that his code, more so than his many military victories, would have a lasting legacy. Parts of it are still in use around the world today. The terms of the code are the main basis for many other countries’ civil codes throughout Europe and North America.

The Napoleonic Wars were a series of European wars lasting from 1803 to Napoleon’s permanent abdication of power in 1815.

In 1803, in part to raise funds for war, France sold its North American Louisiana Territory to the United States for $15 million, a transaction known as the Louisiana Purchase . Napoleon then returned to war with Britain, Russia, and Austria.

In 1805, the British registered an important naval victory against France at the Battle of Trafalgar , which led Napoleon to scrap his plans to invade England. Instead, he set his sights on Austria and Russia, beating back both militaries in the Battle of Austerlitz.

Other victories soon followed, allowing Napoleon to greatly expand the French empire and paving the way for loyalists to his government—including his brothers and other family members—to be installed in Holland, Italy, Naples, Sweden, Spain, and Westphalia.

Invasion of Russia

In 1812, France was devastated when Napoleon’s invasion of Russia turned out to be a colossal failure—and the beginning of the end for Napoleon. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers in Napoleon’s Grand Army were killed or badly wounded: Out of an original fighting force of some 600,000 men, just 10,000 soldiers were still fit for battle.

News of the defeat reinvigorated Napoleon’s enemies, both inside and outside of France. Some attempted a failed coup while Napoleon led his charge against Russia and as the British began to advance through French territories. With international pressure mounting and his government lacking the resources to fight back against his enemies, Napoleon surrendered to allied forces on March 30, 1814.

First Exile

About a week later, on April 6, Napoleon was forced to abdicate power and went into exile on the island of Elba off the Italian coast in the Mediterranean Sea. His exile didn’t last long, as he watched France stumbled forward without him.

In March 1815, Napoleon escaped the island and quickly made his way back to Paris. King Louis XVIII fled, and Napoleon triumphantly returned to power. But the enthusiasm that greeted Napoleon when he resumed control of the government soon gave way to old frustrations and fears about his leadership.

On June 16, 1815, Napoleon led French troops into Belgium and defeated the Prussians; two days later, he was defeated by the British, reinforced by Prussian fighters, at the Battle of Waterloo .

It was a humiliating loss, and on June 22, 1815, Napoleon abdicated his powers for good. In an effort to prolong his dynasty, he pushed to have his young son, Napoleon II, named emperor, but the coalition rejected the offer.

After Napoleon’s abdication from power in 1815, fearing a repeat of his earlier return from exile on Elba, the British government sent Napoleon to the remote island of St. Helena in the southern Atlantic Ocean. He lived there for the rest of his life.

For the most part, Napoleon was free to do as he pleased at his new home. He had leisurely mornings, wrote often, and read a lot. But the tedious routine of life soon got to him, and he often shut himself indoors.

According to historian Kate Williams’ 2014 book Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte , Napoleon continued to show great affection for his ex-wife , who died of pneumonia at her Malmaison estate in May 1814. He had portraits of Josephine placed throughout his residence and even ate off plates with her likeness on them.

Starting in 1817, Napoleon’s health began to deteriorate. In early 1821, he was bedridden and growing weaker by the day. That April, he dictated his last will: “I wish my ashes to rest on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of that French people which I have loved so much. I die before my time, killed by the English oligarchy and its hired assassins.”

Napoleon died on May 5, 1821, on the island of St. Helena at age 51. Allegedly, he uttered his ex-wife Josephine’s name as his final word.

During his final weeks, he experienced symptoms such as vomiting, incessant hiccups, and blood clots. Physicians who conducted his autopsy ruled stomach cancer, exacerbated by bleeding gastric ulcers, as the cause of Napoleon’s death. According to PBS News Hour , Napoleon’s cancer was in an advanced state, and his family history of gastric carcinomas supported the autopsy results.

However, researchers have posited alternative theories regarding his demise. In 1961, Swedish dentist Sten Forshufvud and Drs. Hamilton Smith and Anders Wassen analyzed a sample of his hair and published an article suggesting he might have died from arsenic poisoning. Although other experts have rebuffed this theory, it has led to conspiracies surrounding Napoleon’s death.

Despite what he requested in his last will, Napoleon was initially buried on St. Helena on May 9, 1821, in the Geranium Valley, now known as the Valley of the Tomb. In 1840, he was exhumed by order of French King Louis-Phillippe , and Bonaparte’s remains were transferred back to mainland France, arriving on December 15 .

Napoleon’s tomb is located in Paris in the Dôme des Invalides . Originally a royal chapel built between 1677 and 1706, the Invalides were turned into a military pantheon under Napoleon’s reign. In addition to Napoleon Bonaparte, several other French notables are buried there, including: Napoleon II, the King of Rome and Napoleon’s son; Napoleon’s brothers Joseph and Jérôme Bonaparte; Generals Henri-Gratien Bertrand and Géraud-Christophe-Michel Duroc; and the French Marshals Ferdinand Foch and Hubert Lyautey.

Not surprising given his place in world history, Napoleon has appeared on the big screen many times with depictions ranging from purposefully humorous to based in realism.

Marlon Brando and Dennis Hopper were cast as Bonaparte in the 1950s movies Désirée (1954) and The Story of Mankind (1957), respectively. The general also appears in films such as Waterloo (1970), Time Bandits (1981), and The Count of Monte Cristo (2002).

In terms of more fantastical portrayals, Napoleon is a character in the 1989 cult comedy Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, in which the title characters played by Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves decide to abduct historical figures for their high school project through the use of time travel. He also appears as an antagonist in the 2009 sequel Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian .

In 2023, director Ridley Scott helmed a new biopic simply titled Napoleon that released in theaters on November 22. The movie stars Joaquin Phoenix as the French emperor and Vanessa Kirby as Josephine and focuses heavily on their tumultuous relationship. Napoleon marked a reunion for Phoenix and Scott, who worked on the 2000 classic Gladiator also starring Russell Crowe .

• I am never angry when contradicted; I seek to be enlightened.
• I wish my ashes to rest on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of that French people which I have loved so much. I die before my time, killed by the English oligarchy and its hired assassins.
• A revolution is an idea which has found its bayonets.
• A great people may be killed, but they will not be intimidated.
• He who fears being conquered is certain of defeat.
• Love does more harm than good.
• A man is not dependent upon his fellow creature, when he does not fear death.
• It is the cause, and not the death that makes the martyr.
• Even when I am gone, I shall remain in people’s minds the star of their rights, my name will be the war cry of their efforts, the motto of their hopes.
• Men of genius are meteors, intended to burn to light their century.
• Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
• In choosing a wife, a man does not renounce his mother, and still less is he justified with breaking her heart.

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A short biography of Napoleon Bonaparte

Last Updated:  9 July 2022

You may hate him or love him… but you can’t ignore Napoleon Bonaparte, the former French emperor! Born in 1769 in Corsica from the minor nobility, Napoleon rose to fame during the French Revolution and proclaimed himself emperor in 1804. His legacy is still visible in France. Think about the Code Napoleon still in use today. Or the Arc de Triomphe that he commissioned (but never saw completed). Here is a (very) brief biography of Napoleon Bonaparte…

A (very) short biography of Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte was born in Ajaccio, Corsica, on the 15th of August 1769 .

Born two years before it would have been Italian as the Mediterranean island became part of France in 1767.

This military genius who graduated from the Ecole Militaire in Paris became a general at the young age of 26.

From First Consul to Emperor

Napoleon was elected First Consul of France for life in 1802. In December 1804 he crowned himself emperor of the French at Notre-Dame cathedral . The coronation brought the 1st Republic to an end. France was now under a military despotism presided over by an absolute monarch. His court was re-established in the Tuileries .

During the 10 years of his reign, he successfully conquered Spain, Germany, Poland, Austria, and Italy.

Napoleon is known for having translated the great principles of the French Revolution into law, giving France a new civil code: the Code Napoléon . His work still remains in force not only in France but also in other countries. He re-established public worship and religious tolerance, making an agreement (the Concordat ) with the Pope in 1801.

But the emperor’s greatest mistake was the invasion of Russia in 1812. The great distances and severe cold of Russia caused the loss of most of his army.

Napoleon was defeated at Leipzig in 1814. Forced to abdicate, Napoleon was banished to the tiny Mediterranean island of Elba off the coast of Italy for a kingdom and granted a pension for life.  

In February 1815, Napoleon returned to France for “ Les Cent Jours ” (The Hundred Days).

After a few victories, Napoleon was lured into a confrontation with the Allied armies, commanded by the Duke of Wellington, at Waterloo in Belgium, on the 15th June 1815.

Napoleon’s exile and death

Napoleon abdicated on the 22nd June 1815 and was taken in exile by the English under guard to the lonely island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic, a British possession.

Napoleon Bonaparte died on the 5th May 1821  in St. Helena.

In his will, Napoleon had asked to be buried in Paris on the banks of the Seine “ in the midst of the French people [whom I] loved so much “. However, the British governor insisted that he should be buried on the island, in a place called the Valley of the Willows.

Placed in a solitary spot, the tomb of Napoleon was covered by three bare slabs placed level with the soil. These slabs can still be seen today in the garden of Les Invalides .

The ‘retour des cendres’ in 1840

Then in 1840, King Louis-Philippe was granted from the British the agreement to repatriate Napoleon’s remains to France. The ‘ retour des cendres ‘ (returning of the ashes) is an episode that relates the return of the mortal remains of Napoleon in the Hôtel des Invalides , Paris.

When the mortal remains of Napoleon was transferred from St. Helena Island to France, the tomb was set up in the St. Jérôme chapel, a side-chapel of the Dome church of Les Invalides.

Architect Louis Visconti had a circular hollow cut beneath the dome to create a sort of an open crypt. In its centre would be placed a large sarcophagus containing the remains of the emperor.

Napoleon’s coffin was moved to the dedicated crypt in 1861 during a ceremony presided by his nephew, Napoleon III.

>> Get your Tickets for Les Invalides: the Army Museum [Priority Entrance], Napoleon’s tomb and see war memorabilia! <<

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About the author

Pierre is a French/Australian who is passionate about France and its culture. He grew up in France and Germany and has also lived in Australia and England. He has a background teaching French, Economics and Current Affairs, and holds a Master of Translating and Interpreting English-French with the degree of Master of International Relations, and a degree of Economics and Management. Pierre is the author of Discovery Courses and books about France.

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This is very nice bio on Napoleon Bonaparte….. ❤❤😇😇

You’re welcome!

This was a great biography of Napoleon Bonaparte which helped me to do my history holiday homework…

Thank you, glad the article helped! 🙂

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Biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, Great Military Commander

At its height, his empire covered much of Europe

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Napoleon Bonaparte (August 15, 1769–May 5, 1821), one of the greatest military commanders in history, was the twice- emperor of France whose military endeavors and sheer personality dominated Europe for a decade.

In military affairs, legal issues, economics, politics, technology, culture, and society in general, his actions influenced the course of European history for over a century, and some argue, to this very day.

Fast Facts: Napoleon Bonaparte

• Known For : Emperor of France, conqueror of much of Europe
• Also Known As : Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon 1st of France, The Little Corporal , The Corsican
• Born : August 15, 1769 in Ajaccio, Corsica
• Parents : Carlo Buonaparte, Letizia Ramolino
• Died : May 5, 1821 on Saint Helena, United Kingdom
• Published Works : Le souper de Beaucaire (Supper at Beaucaire), a pro-republican pamphlet (1793); the Napoleonic Code , the French civil code (1804); authorized the publication of Description de l'Égypte , a multivolume work authored by dozens of scholars detailing Egypt's archeology, topography, and natural history (1809-1821)
• Awards and Honors : Founder and grand master of the Legion of Honor (1802), the Order of the Iron Crown (1805), the Order of the Reunion (1811)
• Spouse(s) : Josephine de Beauharnais (m. March 8, 1796–Jan. 10, 1810), Marie-Louise (m. April 2, 1810–May 5, 1821)
• Children : Napoleon II
• Notable Quote : "Great ambition is the passion of a great character. Those endowed with it may perform very good or very bad acts. All depends on the principles which direct them."

Napoleon was born in Ajaccio, Corsica, on August 15, 1769, to Carlo Buonaparte , a lawyer and political opportunist, and his wife Marie-Letizia . The Buonapartes were a wealthy family from the Corsican nobility, although when compared to the great aristocracies of France, Napoleon's kin were poor.

Napoleon entered the military academy at Brienne in 1779. He moved to the Parisian École Royale Militaire in 1784 and graduated a year later as a second lieutenant in the artillery. Spurred on by his father's death in February 1785, the future emperor had completed in one year a course that often took three.

Early Career

Despite being posted on the French mainland, Napoleon was able to spend much of the next eight years in Corsica thanks to his ferocious letter writing and rule-bending, as well as the effects of the French Revolution (which led to the French Revolutionary Wars ) and sheer good luck. There he played an active part in political and military matters, initially supporting the Corsican rebel Pasquale Paoli, a former patron of Carlo Buonaparte.

Military promotion also followed, but Napoleon became opposed to Paoli and when civil war erupted in 1793 the Buonapartes fled to France, where they adopted the French version of their name: Bonaparte.

The French Revolution had decimated the republic's officer class and favored individuals could achieve swift promotion, but Napoleon's fortunes rose and fell as one set of patrons came and went. By December 1793, Napoleon was the hero of Toulon , a general and favorite of Augustin Robespierre; shortly after the wheel of revolution turned and Napoleon was arrested for treason. Tremendous political flexibility saved him and the patronage of Vicomte Paul de Barras, soon to be one of France's three "Directors," followed.

Napoleon became a hero again in 1795, defending the government from angry counter-revolutionary forces; Baras rewarded Napoleon by promoting him to high military office, a position with access to the political spine of France. Napoleon swiftly grew into one of the country's most respected military authorities, largely by never keeping his opinions to himself, and he married Josephine de Beauharnais in 1796.

Rise to Power

In 1796, France attacked Austria. Napoleon was given command of the Army of Italy , whereupon he welded a young, starving and disgruntled army into a force which won victory after victory against theoretically stronger Austrian opponents.

Napoleon returned to France in 1797 as the nation's brightest star, having fully emerged from the need for a patron. Ever a great self-publicist, he maintained the profile of a political independent, thanks partly to the newspapers he now ran.

In May 1798, Napoleon left for a campaign in Egypt and Syria, prompted by his desire for fresh victories, the French need to threaten Britain's empire in India and the Directory's concerns that their famous general might seize power.

The Egyptian campaign was a military failure (although it had a great cultural impact) and a change of government in France caused Bonaparte to leave—some might say abandon—his army and return in the August 1799. Shortly after he took part in the Brumaire coup of November 1799, finishing as a member of the Consulate, France's new ruling triumvirate.

First Consul

The transfer of power might not have been smooth, owing much to luck and apathy, but Napoleon's great political skill was clear; by February 1800, he was established as the First Consul, a practical dictatorship with a constitution wrapped firmly around him. However, France was still at war with her fellows in Europe and Napoleon set out to beat them. He did so within a year, although the key triumph, the Battle of Marengo, fought in June 1800, was won by the French General Desaix.

From Reformer to Emperor

Having concluded treaties that left Europe at peace, Bonaparte began working on France, reforming the economy, legal system (the famous and enduring Code Napoleon), church, military, education, and government. He studied and commented on minute details, often while traveling with the army, and the reforms continued for most of his rule. Bonaparte exhibited skill as both legislator and statesmen.

Napoleon's popularity remained high, helped by his mastery of propaganda but also genuine national support, and he was elected Consulate for life by the French people in 1802 and Emperor of France in 1804, a title which he worked hard to maintain and glorify. Initiatives like the Concordat with the Church and the Code helped secure his status.

Return to War

Europe was not at peace for long. Napoleon's fame, ambitions, and character were based on conquest, making it almost inevitable that his reorganized Grande Armée would fight further wars. However, other European countries also sought conflict, for not only did they distrust and fear Napoleon, but they also retained their hostility toward revolutionary France.

For the next eight years, Napoleon dominated Europe, fighting and defeating a range of alliances involving combinations of Austria, Britain, Russia, and Prussia. Sometimes his victories were crushing—such as Austerlitz in 1805, often cited as the greatest military victory ever—and at other times, he was either very lucky, fought almost to a standstill, or both.

Napoleon forged new states in Europe, including the German Confederation—built from the ruins of the Holy Roman Empire —and the Duchy of Warsaw, while also installing his family and favorites in positions of great power. The reforms continued and Napoleon had an ever-increasing effect on culture and technology, becoming a patron of both the arts and sciences while stimulating creative responses across Europe.

Disaster in Russia

The Napoleonic Empire may have shown signs of decline by 1811, including a downturn in diplomatic fortunes and continuing failure in Spain, but such matters were overshadowed by what happened next. In  1812 Napoleon went to war with Russia , assembling a force of over 400,000 soldiers, accompanied by the same number of followers and support. Such an army was almost impossible to feed or adequately control and the Russians repeatedly retreated, destroying the local resources and separating Napoleon's army from its supplies.

Napoleon continually dithered, eventually reaching Moscow on Sept. 8, 1812, after the Battle of Borodino, a bludgeoning conflict where over 80,000 soldiers died. However, the Russians refused to surrender, instead torching Moscow and forcing Napoleon into a long retreat back to friendly territory. The Grande Armée was assailed by starvation, extremes of weather and terrifying Russian partisans throughout, and by the end of 1812 only 10,000 soldiers were able to fight. Many of the rest had died in horrible conditions, with the camp's followers faring even worse.

A coup had been attempted in Napoleon's absence from France and his enemies in Europe were reinvigorated, forming a grand alliance intent on removing him. Vast numbers of enemy soldiers advanced across Europe toward France, overturning the states Bonaparte had created. The combined forces of Russia, Prussia, Austria, and others just used a simple plan, retreating from the emperor himself and advancing again when he moved to face the next threat.

Throughout 1813 and into 1814 the pressure grew on Napoleon; not only were his enemies grinding his forces down and approaching Paris, but the British had fought out of Spain and into France, the Grande Armée's Marshalls were underperforming and Bonaparte had lost the French public's support.

Nevertheless, for the first half of 1814 Napoleon exhibited the military genius of his youth, but it was a war he couldn't win alone. On March 30, 1814, Paris surrendered to allied forces without a fight and, facing massive betrayal and impossible military odds, Napoleon abdicated as Emperor of France; he was exiled to the Island of Elba.

Second Exile and Death

Napoleon made a sensational  return to power in 1815 . Traveling to France in secret, he attracted vast support and reclaimed his imperial throne, as well as reorganizing the army and government. After a series of initial engagements, Napoleon was narrowly defeated in one of history's greatest battles: Waterloo.

This final adventure had occurred in less than 100 days, closing with Napoleon's second abdication on June 25, 1815, whereupon British forces forced him into further exile. Housed on St. Helena, a small rocky island well away from Europe in the South Atlantic Ocean, Napoleon's health and character fluctuated; he died within six years, on May 5, 1821, at age 51.

Napoleon helped perpetuate a state of European-wide warfare that lasted for 20 years. Few individuals have ever had such a huge effect on the world, on economics, politics, technology, culture, and society.

Napoleon may not have been a general of utter genius, but he was very good; he may not have been the best politician of his age, but he was often superb; he may not have been a perfect legislator, but his contributions were hugely important. Napoleon used his talents—through luck, talent, or force of will—to rise from chaos and then build, lead, and spectacularly destroy an empire before doing it all again in a tiny microcosm one year later. Whether a hero or tyrant, the reverberations were felt across Europe for a century.

• I, Napoleon. “ Description of Egypt. Second Edition. Antiquities, Volume One (Plates). ”  WDL RSS , Detroit Publishing Company, 1 Jan. 1970.
• “ 16 Most Remarkable Napoleon Bonaparte Quotes. ”  Goalcast , Goalcast, 6 Dec. 2018.
• Editors, History.com. “ Napoleon Bonaparte. ”  History.com , A&E Television Networks, 9 Nov. 2009.
• Letizia Bonaparte: Napoleon's Mother
• Bonaparte / Buonaparte
• The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
• How Napoleon Became Emperor
• Influential Leaders in European History
• Historical Profile of France
• Charles Maurice De Talleyrand: Skilled Diplomat or Turncoat?
• A Beginner's Guide to the French Revolution
• The 19 Best Books on the Napoleonic Wars
• A History of the Napoleonic Code (Code Napoléon)
• Napoleon and the Italian Campaign of 1796–7
• Napoleon and the Siege of Toulon 1793
• Napoleonic Wars: Marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte
• When and How the French Revolution Ended
• Napoleonic Wars: Marshal Michel Ney

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A Short History of Napoleon, the Ambitious, Charismatic Emperor of France

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More words have been written about Napoleon Bonaparte than almost any other historical figure. But for those with limited time resources, here's a short primer on the wildly ambitious French military leader with help from Peter Hicks, historian and manager of international affairs for the Fondation Napoléon in Paris.

Born in Corsica, Arrives in France

Marriage to josephine, hero of the italian campaign, visions of empire in the exotic east, from first consul to emperor, napoleon helped make modern france, france versus the world, in russia, napoleon was beaten by retreat, exile to elba, triumphant return and final defeat at waterloo, death on st. helena, an island prison.

Napoleon was born Napoleone di Buonaparte Aug. 15, 1769, on the island of Corsica, only recently bought by France from the Italian city-state of Genoa. Young Napoleon, the son of a prominent Corsican family, was sent to mainland France for school, where his Parisian classmates made fun of his provincial accent.

"Instead of calling him Napoleon, they called him 'straw on the nose,'" says Hicks, "mispronouncing his name in French with a Corsican accent."

After graduating from the French military academy and becoming part of the French Revolution , Napoleon dropped the extra vowels in his Italian-sounding name.

Napoleon was six years her junior when he met 32-year-old Paris socialite Marie-Josephe-Rose de Beauharnais , who already had two children : Eugène, born in 1781 and Hortense, born in 1783. Their father, Alexandre de Beauharnais, had been executed in 1794 during France's Reign of Terror. Napoleon and Josephine married in 1796 and Napoleon became stepfather to her children.

In the course of time, it was discovered that Josephine was incapable of having more children. Napoleon would divorce her in 1809 to marry Austrian Archduchess Maria-Louise, banking on her to produce him an heir, which she did with the birth of a son, Napoléon François Joseph Charles Bonaparte, later Napoleon II, in 1811. Napoleon was said to have loved Josephine for the rest of his life and her name was reportedly the last word on his lips when he died in 1821.

But back to the battlefield.

Napoleon rose through the ranks of the French army and was promoted to major general after helping to quash a royalist coup in Paris. In 1796, at just 26 years old, he was sent to Italy to mount a last-ditch campaign against France's bitter rival Austria. He found the French troops exhausted and unpaid but whipped them into excitement with promises of glory and riches to be won.

Despite being outnumbered almost two-to-one by Austrian and Italian Piedmontese fighters, Napoleon used speed and cunning to separate the enemy forces and ruthlessly attack their weak points. Napoleon's armies could cover up to 30 miles (48 kilometers) a day compared to just 6 or 7 (10 or 11 kilometers) for the Austrians and Italians.

"They sent a young madman who attacks right, left and from the rear," complained a Piedmontese officer. "It's an intolerable way of making war."

When the Austrians and Italians surrendered, Napoleon demanded payment in gold, which he gave to his fighting men, sealing their loyalty. Word of his exploits spread far and wide.

"Napoleon really burst onto the scene with the staggering success of the first Italian campaign, which put him on the radar with the rest of Europe," says Hicks. "Everybody wanted to know, 'Who is this guy?'"

It didn't take long for Napoleon to begin seeing himself as the French incarnation of Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great . He could have made a play for emperor in 1797, but felt the moment wasn't quite right in Paris. So he rallied his armies and set off for Egypt, where he hoped to cut off British trade with India.

Napoleon scholar Jean Tulard called the Egyptian campaign, "probably the craziest expedition in the history of France." Napoleon marched 35,000 troops across the desert from the port city of Alexandria toward Cairo. At the Battle of the Pyramids, he faced a wall of 10,000 fearless Mameluke fighters on horseback.

"Soldiers," Napoleon shouted to his troops, "from the height of these pyramids, 40 centuries look down upon you."

The French, following Napoleon's ingenious battlefield strategies, crushed the saber-wielding Mamelukes and took Cairo. But while Napoleon was daydreaming of conquest — "I saw myself founding a new religion," he later wrote , "marching into Asia riding an elephant, a turban on my head, and in my hand the new Koran" — the British struck back, destroying the French fleet docked in the Mediterranean.

Stranded in Egypt, Napoleon decided to pick more fights with the locals. He took on the Turks in Syria and bombarded the centuries-old walls at the ancient city of Acre. But by 1798, morale was low and a civil war was raging back home. Napoleon saw an opening for his triumphant return, so he abandoned his troops in Egypt and secretly made for France.

The Egyptian campaign wasn't a total wash, though. Napoleon's soldiers, while digging to reinforce a fortress wall in 1799, made an accidental discovery in the Nile Delta — the Rosetta Stone .

When Napoleon arrived in France in October 1798, he found his country in chaos. The state coffers were empty, a coalition of enemies was on the attack, and the French central government lead by a five-man Directory was divided and crumbling. France needed a strong, authoritarian leader and Napoleon knew just the right guy for the job.

In a matter of weeks, he plotted with two of the Directors and some wealthy backers to hatch a coup d'etat. They convinced the legislature that another royalist coup was imminent, pretense for relocating the government to a country palace and sending in troops to "protect" them.

First, Napoleon made a ham-handed speech presenting himself as France's savior, which the constitutional body violently rejected, crying "down with the dictator!" and "death to the tyrant!" He returned the next day with more troops, and in a complicated series of political maneuvers , convinced the deputies to dissolve the Directory and create a new three-person consul with Napoleon at its head.

After rallying the army to defeat the Austrians, Napoleon earned the title of "First Consul for Life" and decided it was time to bring monarchy back to post-Revolution France. On Dec. 2, 1804, after literally snatching the crown from the hand of Pope Pius VII, Napoleon named himself Emperor of France.

While still First Consul, Napoleon created several new state institutions and spearheaded reforms that pulled the country out of chaos by consolidating power in a strong central government.

Among the big changes were to bring religion back to France through a pact with the Pope. Not only did Napoleonic France recognize Catholics, but welcomed Protestants and Jews on equal footing.

Under Napoleon, France created its first central bank, the franc was introduced, and taxes were collected in a fair and timely manner. The messy post-Revolution legal system was codified under what's known as the Civil Code or the Napoleonic Code . On the flip side, women lost almost all legal rights and slavery was reintroduced in French colonies.

"Government was settled along a top-down structure — and it was very much one man at the top," says Hicks, "but Napoleon's reforms brought financial security, and also political and social stability."

Napoleon's rule of France was dominated by nonstop fighting with European rivals, chiefly Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia. The Napoleonic Wars spanned from 1796 to 1815 and were bankrolled by Britain, the major economic and military power of the day.

"Britain was happy to have Europe fighting itself so it could run the rest of the world," says Hicks. "Britain paid other countries to do the fighting against France, but the other guys didn't need much encouraging. They found Napoelonic France quite challenging."

The British formed coalition after coalition against the French Empire, but Napoleon managed to keep the upper hand and even win more territory until 1812, when he made a fateful and failed gamble in Russia.

When the Russian czar Alexander I backed out of Napoleon's blockade of British goods in 1811, Napoleon was livid. Against the advice of his generals, Napoleon chose to invade Russia with one of the largest European armies ever assembled, an estimated 600,000 soldiers from France, Italy, Germany and Poland.

Napoleon's army charged into Russia in the blazing heat of the summer. The Russians, overwhelmed by the sheer number of enemy fighters, fell back in retreat, burning the towns and countryside behind them. Exhausted and without towns to raid for supplies, the French forces suffered from disease and desertion.

Finally, the two armies met at the Battle of Borodino, where Napoleon threw his men into a brutal, all-day assault that cost tens of thousands of lives on both sides. The Russians finally relented and Napoleon marched triumphantly into Moscow, only to find the city in flames.

The Russian winter arrived early and with a vengeance. Napoleon's army, fully unprepared for temperatures as low as -22 degrees F (-30 degrees C), froze to death by the thousands. Starving soldiers killed each other over horsemeat. And throughout the ordeal, Cossacks raided the retreating French army, dealing devastating blows to its flanks and rear.

Of Napoleon's invading army of 600,000, only 100,000 made it out of Russia alive.

After barely escaping total disaster in Russia, Napoleon came home to fight off another coalition of European foes: Britain, Russia, Prussia, Sweden and Austria. With diminished forces, he held off the coalition for a year before the enemy marched on Paris itself and Napoleon's generals refused to follow him into a final battle.

On April 12, 1814, Napoleon abdicated his throne and was exiled to the tiny island of Elba between Italy and Corsica. Hicks says that Napoleon's expulsion to Elba was "kind of a joke," less of a punishment for Napoleon than a strategy engineered by the Russians to destabilize Austrian-controlled Italy.

"Cartoons at the time compared Napoleon on Elba to Vesuvius next to Naples," says Hicks. "It's going to blow up, and it did."

After less than a year in exile, Napoleon sailed from Elba with 1,000 supporters and landed on the French mainland, where he was met by exultant crowds. King Louis XVIII, who had been installed by the coalition allies in Napoleon's place, skipped town without a fight. The Emperor was back, but not for long.

What followed is known as the Hundred Days Campaign, Napoleon's last desperate grasp at power. With coalition forces amassing against him, Napoleon decided to strike first by invading Belgium. He had some luck against the Prussians in a preliminary battle, but then he came up against the British outside the Belgian town of Waterloo.

The British army, under the command of the formidable Duke of Wellington, numbered 68,000 troops at Waterloo, roughly the same size as Napoleon's force. But Napoleon didn't know that the Prussians were waiting in the wings with 72,000 more enemy troops. Napoleon might have won if he had ordered the attack on the British line sooner, but he opted to wait and let the muddy ground dry. Those extra hours gave the Prussians time to join the fight and rout the French.

On June 22, 1815, Napoleon abdicated the throne for the second and final time.

The British weren't going to take any chances with Napoleon's second exile. They chose the remote tropical island of St. Helena, thousands of miles from France off the coast of Africa. There, in a ramshackle estate called Longwood, a single prisoner was guarded by 2,800 men and a Royal Navy squadron of 11 ships.

Napoleon died May 5, 1821, likely from stomach cancer. He was 51 years old. He was buried on St. Helena, but his remains were eventually returned to France where he was entombed at Les Invalides among the great French leaders of all time.

Napoleon wasn't nearly as short as his enemies made him out to be. Historians believe he stood 5 feet, 6.5 inches (169 centimeters), which was average for his day.

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Biography Online

Napoleon Bonaparte Biography

“France has more need of me than I have need of France. “

Born in Corsica and trained as an artillery officer in mainland France, he rose to prominence under the First French Republic. He distinguished himself as a military commander fighting in Italy. In 1799, Bonaparte staged a coup d’état and installed himself as First Consul; five years later he crowned himself Emperor of the French. In the first decade of the Nineteenth Century, he turned the armies of the French Empire against every major European power and dominated continental Europe, through a series of military victories epitomised in battles such as Austerlitz. He maintained France’s sphere of influence by the formation of extensive alliances and the appointment of friends and family members to rule other European countries as French client states. It appeared that through Napoleon’s tactical genius, nothing could stop the French as they won a series of military victories.

“Circumstances–what are circumstances? I make circumstances.”

However, in 1812, the French invasion of Russia led to a reversal of fortunes. His army succeeded in advancing to the outskirts of Moscow, but it was a hollow victory. The Russians had retreated into the interior, leaving a desolate and empty city. Cold and worn down with illness, his Grande Armée was forced into a long and painful retreat through the deep freeze of the Russian winter.

In 1813, the Sixth Coalition defeated his forces at Leipzig, and the following year the Coalition invaded France, forcing Napoleon to abdicate and making him an exile in the island of Elba. However, less than a year later, Napoleon escaped Elba. After his escape, an army was sent by Louis XVIII to arrest Napoleon, but Napoleon was able to sway his former army and they dramatically joined up with Napoleon. On returning to Paris, Louis XVIII fled and Napoleon regained power. Almost straight away, eight European countries joined forces against him to make a coalition army led by the Duke of Wellington .  It was at Waterloo, in June 1815, that the Duke of Wellington decided to turn and fight Napoleon. The Battle of Waterloo was a close-run affair, with the outcome uncertain at one stage. But, the arrival of the Prussian army helped to swing the battle against the French, and Napoleon was eventually decisively beaten and ousted from power.

Napoleon spent the last six years of his life under British supervision on the island of Saint Helena, where he died. His autopsy concluded he died of stomach cancer, though Sten Forshufvud and other scientists have since conjectured that he had been poisoned with arsenic.

Despite his military prowess and empire building, he was also conscious of a more spiritual perspective on life.

“Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded his empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for him. ”

Napoleon scored major victories with a modernised French army and drew his tactics from different sources. His campaigns are studied at military academies the world over, and he is regarded as one of history’s great commanders. While considered a tyrant by his opponents, he is also remembered for the establishment of the Napoleonic code, which laid the administrative and judicial foundations for much of Western Europe.

Commentary on Life of Napoleon

Napoleon was a colossal figure of nineteenth-century Europe. He had an unfettered conviction in his own destiny and that of Europe. He paved the way for a very impressive modern European Empire. In doing so, he swept away much of the old feudal systems and customs of Europe. Napoleon helped to usher in a new era of European politics. He established a Napoleonic code of religious tolerance, rational values and a degree of liberalism. Yet, he was a man of paradoxes: his naked ambition led to costly wars with 6 million dead across Europe. His liberalism and tolerance were imposed with ruthless efficiency and conquest of foreign lands. Sri Aurobindo later summed up the paradox of Napoleon by saying, “Napoleon was the despotic defender of democracy.”

Eventually, his ambition outreached his ability, leading to his humiliation in the severe Russian winter and later against the British at Waterloo.

The Duke of Wellington , the British Commander at Waterloo was asked who he thought was the best General of all time. Wellington’s reply was revealing in its unmitigated praise for Napoleon.

“In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon!

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography of Napoleon”, Oxford, UK. www.biographyonline.net, 01/10/2013 updated 22 September 2017

Napoleon: A Biography

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Napoleon Bonaparte is a name that evokes both admiration and controversy. As one of the most iconic figures in history, he is remembered as a brilliant military strategist, a charismatic leader, and a symbol of revolution. His meteoric rise to power and eventual downfall have captivated people for centuries, and his legacy continues to shape the world we live in today. In this article, we will delve into the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, exploring his early years, his ascent to power, and the events that led to his ultimate downfall.

Through examining his life, we will gain a deeper understanding of this complex historical figure and the impact he had on the world. So, let us embark on a journey through history as we uncover the rise and fall of the revolutionary leader, Napoleon Bonaparte. To truly understand Napoleon Bonaparte , we must first delve into the historical context of his rise to power. At a time when Europe was undergoing major political and social changes, Napoleon emerged as a charismatic and ambitious leader who was determined to make his mark on the world. He rose through the ranks of the French military, eventually seizing control of the country in a coup d'état in 1799. From there, he went on to establish himself as the Emperor of France and conquer vast territories across Europe.

His reign was marked by military conquests , political reforms, and cultural advancements that transformed France and left a lasting impact on the rest of the world. Napoleon's rise to power was fueled by the turmoil of the French Revolution , a period of intense social and political upheaval in France. As a young officer in the French army, he quickly gained recognition for his strategic brilliance and leadership skills. His military successes and political savvy caught the attention of influential figures in France, including the Directory - the governing body of the country at the time. In 1799, with support from key allies and fellow military leaders, Napoleon staged a coup d'état and overthrew the Directory, establishing himself as First Consul and effectively becoming the ruler of France. This marked the beginning of his rise to power and his transformation into one of the most influential leaders in European history. As First Consul, Napoleon implemented a series of political and social reforms that aimed to stabilize France and consolidate his power.

He introduced a new constitution, reformed the legal system, and established a centralized government that allowed for more efficient decision-making. These reforms helped to restore order in France and earned Napoleon the support of the French people. In 1804, Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of France, solidifying his position as the country's absolute ruler. With a firm grip on power, he set his sights on expanding the French empire and establishing French dominance in Europe. Over the next decade, Napoleon led his army to victory in numerous military campaigns, conquering and annexing territories across Europe and spreading French influence and ideals. However, Napoleon's thirst for power and military conquest ultimately led to his downfall.

As his empire grew, so did the opposition from other European powers who feared the threat of French dominance. In 1812, Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia marked the beginning of his decline. He faced a series of defeats in battles against a coalition of European armies, eventually leading to his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Napoleon was exiled to the island of Saint Helena, where he spent the rest of his days until his death in 1821. Despite his defeat and downfall, Napoleon's legacy continues to live on. His influence on military strategy, political systems, and cultural developments can still be seen today.

The Napoleon Series

From revolutionary to ruler.

His rise to power was met with both praise and criticism, as some saw him as a savior of the Republic while others feared his authoritarian tendencies. Nevertheless, Napoleon's rule brought about significant changes in France, including the introduction of a new legal system, the Napoleonic Code, and major economic and social reforms. He also expanded France's territory through successful military campaigns, establishing himself as one of the most powerful leaders in Europe. However, Napoleon's ambitions ultimately led to his downfall. His failed invasion of Russia in 1812 and his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 marked the end of his reign as Emperor of France. He was exiled to the island of Saint Helena, where he died in 1821. Despite his eventual defeat, Napoleon's legacy continues to be a topic of debate among historians.

The Legacy of Napoleon

The napoleonic code, cultural impact, influence on modern leaders, the napoleonic wars, napoleon bonaparte's legacy, new articles.

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Napoleon Bonaparte

What events led Napoleon to become one of history's greatest military leaders?

Napoleon Bonaparte was one of the most successful generals of the French revolutionary armies. He was emperor of France from 1804-14, and in 1815.

Napoleon Bonaparte (1768-1821) is regarded as one of history’s greatest military leaders.  Born on 15 August 1769, Napoleon was educated at military school in France. He then joined the army where, following the outbreak of the French Revolution, he rapidly rose through the ranks.

Taking power

By 1796 he was commander of the French army and, in an attempt to disrupt British trade routes with India, he conquered Ottoman-ruled Egypt in 1798, despite the fact the British destroyed the fleet from which he had just landed his forces, in the action called the Battle of the Nile. 

Returning to France a heroic leader in 1799, Napoleon became the country’s ‘first consul’, going on to become Emperor in 1804.

In 1800, at the Battle of Marengo, Napoleon defeated the Austrians, thus establishing France’s power over continental Europe. His sole opponent was Britain.

Peace of Amiens

The Peace of Amiens was signed in 1802, marking the end of the French Revolutionary War. Britain, isolated from her allies, agreed to return territorial conquests to France, Spain and Holland. But by May 1803 the treaty had collapsed because Britain refused to evacuate Malta and Napoleon failed to guarantee Dutch independence. Britain again declared war on France, later followed by Austria and Russia.

British invasion

Napoleon planned an ambitious scheme to invade England in 1804. He stationed 150,000 men and 2000 vessels at Boulogne with the intention of crossing the English Channel. Part of the plan involved distracting the British Navy by encouraging them to chase the French fleet, under the command of Vice-Admiral Villeneuve, from Toulon to the West Indies, then back to France, thus clearing the Channel for invasion.

The British got wind of the plan and attacked the returning Villeneuve off Cape Finisterre. Although not a decisive victory, the British forced the Franco-Spanish fleet to retreat away from the Channel and Napoleon abandoned his invasion plans.

The British went on to successfully attack the Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar in 1805. By then, however, Napoleon was re-focusing his efforts on attacking Austro-Russian forces, successfully beating them later that year in Austerlitz. He went on to defeat the Prussians at Jena and Aurstadt in 1806 and the Russians at Eylau and Friedland in 1807. This earned him greatly expanded territories and a stranglehold over most of Europe.

Napoleon defeated

Determined to destroy Britain, he imposed the ‘Continental Blockade’ in order to stop British European trade. Britain retaliated by preventing any trade entering Europe by sea.

After 1808, there was popular resistance to the French occupation of Portugal and Spain. British forces under the Duke of Wellington began to make headway on the Iberian peninsula. Napoleon overstretched his Empire with the 1812 Russian campaign, losing over 500,000 men. Defeated at Leipzig in 1813, he abdicated in 1814 and was exiled to Elba.

In February 1815, Napoleon escaped from Elba for a final 'Hundred Days' of power. He took over the government in Paris on 20 March and prepared for war once more. His renewed attempt to dominate Europe failed, however, and he finally surrendered to the British after the French defeat at Waterloo on 18 June 1815.

This time he was exiled 5000 miles from Europe, on the island of St Helena, where he lived until his death on 5 May 1821.

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Napoleon Bonaparte

Facts and summary information and article on napoleon bonaparte, emperor napoleon i of france, who is ranked among the greatest military leaders of all time for his performance during the napoleonic wars, napoleon bonaparte facts.

August 15, 1769. Ajaccio, Island of Corsica

May 5, 1821. St. Helena Island

Initial Rank

Second lieutenant, artillery

Highest Rank Achieved

Self-proclaimed emperor, in command of all French armies

Battles Engaged

Napoleon Bonaparte summary: Napoleon Bonaparte—Napoleon I, Emperor of France—was the greatest soldier of his age and ranks among the most renowned military leaders of all time. The tactics he refined in the Napoleonic Wars heavily influenced European and American armies into the 21st century, but his legacy went beyond strictly military concerns. For nearly a quarter of a century his influence in politics, law, and military organization and tactics spread across most of Europe and parts of Africa and the MidEast. The Napoleonic Code of laws did a great deal to standardize law across Europe and brought greater freedom to the peoples of the lands he conquered than they had previously known.

In the military realm, he masterfully adapted existing tactics and made maximum use of the technology of his time and Europe’s improved network of roads. Speed and shock were his primary weapons, and he coordinated the separate arms of infantry, cavalry and artillery effectively. He organized his forces so that armies, corps and even divisions could go into battle and fight independently as needed. He chose skillful subordinates and then closely coordinated their efforts. His chief of staff, Louis Alexandre Berthier, who was as much a master at handling logistics as Napoleon was a master of battlefield tactics, ably aided him. Added to all this was Napoleon’s charisma and personal courage, which earned him the devout allegiance of his soldiers.

After years of successfully outmaneuvering and outfighting armies of several nations, he made the mistake of invading the vast stretches of Russia in 1812. Before the year was over, the French Army that staggered back out of the tsar’s lands was barely a shadow of the conquering horde that had entered in June. Forced to abdicate, Napoleon was sentenced to exile on the island of Elba but escaped and returned to France in 1815. He attempted to resume his winning ways with a rapid strike to divide Anglo-Dutch and Prussian armies in Belgium in order to defeat them in detail, but he lost his final battle, south of Waterloo , on June 15, 1815. Again forced to abdicate, he was exiled to the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic where he died in 1821.

Part conquering megalomaniac, part revolutionary who brought greater freedoms to Europe as he expanded his empire, he left bloodshed and death in his wake but was dedicated to the advancement of France. He said of himself, "Power is my mistress."

Napoleon Rising

Born Napoleon Buonaparte on the French island of Corsica on August 15, 1769, he changed his surname to Bonaparte in 1796 following his first military victories and eventually became simply Napoleon—no surname required. His family was minor nobility with no military tradition, but he read military history voraciously and after an early education in "gentleman subjects," he attended a military school in France. Graduating at age 16, he became a second lieutenant in the artillery. When Corsica declared independence from France in 1793 he severed all ties with the island; he was henceforth a Frenchman, through and through.

During the French Revolution (1789–1799), many army officers fled the country, as they were also nobility. This opened up opportunities for military advancement based on merit rather than birth status. The young Napoleon was handed such an opportunity during the 1793 siege of Toulon, a port city in southern France that had rebelled against the Parisians controlling the revolution. The city had invited in British ships and turned command over to their officers. When the commander of the French artillery was wounded in September, Napoleon was named as his replacement. He performed skillfully and played a vital role in the fall of the city on December 19, for which he was promoted to brigadier general.

He always believed luck played a role in success, and Dame Fortune smiled upon him again in October 1795. When a Royalist revolt against the regime broke out in Paris, Napoleon squelched it with a "whiff of grapeshot" from a battery, killing and wounding hundreds and clearing the streets. He was rewarded with command of the Army of Italy.

Before leaving for his new position he married Josephine de Beauharnais , whose husband had been guillotined during the Reign of Terror. A graceful, attractive woman six years his senior, she had social position that the Corsican hoped would open doors for him. The passionate letters he wrote to her while on campaign indicated he was truly taken with her, and after he declared himself emperor in 1804, she was crowned Empress Josephine; she served as ambassador and hostess and returned to the French court some of the ceremony it had known under the monarchy. She was unable to produce a male heir for Napoleon, however, and he had their marriage annulled in 1810. He then married Marie-Louise of Austria but provided Josephine with a generous settlement and the two remained in close contact.

Napoleon in Italy, 1796-97

France’s revolution was initially viewed by other European nations as an internal matter, but in August 1791 Austria and Prussia, in the declaration of Pillnitz, warned that they were willing to use force to protect King Louis XVI of France. The following April they began soliciting allies for war against the republican government in Paris, which responded by declaring war on Austria. From 1792 on, France found itself embroiled in wars with most nations of Europe; thanks to a new policy of conscription, the republicans are able to raise several large armies, named for their areas of responsibility. Napoleon left Paris to take command of the Army of Italy just days after marrying Josephine.

During 1796-97 he defeated Austrian armies at Lodi, Castiglione, Arcola and Rivoli . At Lodi he personally led a bayonet charge across a bridge to attack the Austrian rear guard. Impressed by his courage, his soldiers affectionately nicknamed their five-foot-two brigadier general "the Little Corporal." The end of 1797 saw him in control of Italy and Austria, and the peace he negotiated expanded France’s holdings in Europe, including giving the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) and Lombardy to France. Napoleon became a national hero.

He next hoped to invade a traditional enemy, Great Britain, against whom France had fought the Hundred Years War (1337–1453), but he soon realized he lacked the strength for a successful cross-channel invasion. Instead, on July 1, 1798, he invaded Egypt to interfere with Britain’s trade lines with India and North Africa. Napoleon won several victories on land against the Turks, who controlled Egypt at the time, but his fleet suffered a severe defeat off Alexandria at the hands of British admiral Horatio Nelson.

Leaving most of his army behind, Napoleon returned to France and joined in an uprising against the ruling Directory. Following the coup of November 9, 1799, he became first consul and was virtually the ruler of France. To solidify his power, he rewrote the French Constitution in 1802, making himself consul for life; two years later he again fiddled with the constitution to declare himself emperor.

One result of Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt was the discovery by one of his soldiers of the Rosetta Stone, which unlocked the language of hieroglyphics, greatly aiding the study of ancient Egypt.

Napoleon’s Years of Glory

As emperor, Napoleon used his power to organize his country’s civil laws into a single civil code. He improved transportation through a program of bridge- and canal-building and reformed the education system. He established leading universities and the Bank of France.

In the meantime, he used a strict conscription system to raise a powerful army and again invaded Austria in 1800, winning a victory on the Marengo Plain in northern Italy; this time, the peace terms recognized the Rhine River as the eastern border of France. His belligerence led to war with Britain in 1803, and two years later Russia and Austria allied with the British against him. To fund his wars, he sold 828,000 square miles of French territory on the North American continent to the young United States of America, an event known in the US as the Louisiana Purchase .

Between 1805 and 1807 he conducted a brilliant campaign marked by rapid maneuvering and violent attacks. Victories over the Austrians at Ulm, an Austro-Russian force at Austerlitz and the Russians at Friedland led to the Treaties of Tilsit with Russia and Prussia (respectively). These treaties made France and Russia allies and essentially split the European continent between the two. Prussia’s territory was reduced by nearly half.

The Continental System

Napoleon used his control of European ports to institute a blockade, excluding British trade from the continent, a situation known as the Continental System. He had suffered another naval defeat at the hands of Horatio Nelson, at Trafalgar ; if he couldn’t invade Britain, he would bankrupt what he called the "nation of shopkeepers." The mutual trade-war blockades between France and Britain created the conditions that led to the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States.

His desire for complete blockade led Napoleon to occupy Portugal in 1807 and Spain in 1808, but Spanish and Portuguese troops aided by the British fought a determined resistance. Known as the Peninsular War , it would tie down 300,000 French soldiers between 1807 and 1814. By October 1813 the British commander in the Peninsular War, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, had crossed the Pyrenees and invaded France.

During the years following the Treaties of Tilsit, Napoleon implemented throughout his European holdings a legal system known as the Napoleonic Code that did much to standardize laws. It guaranteed freedom of religion, abolished serfdom and established free schools for all citizens.

Le Grande Armee Meets Disaster in Russia

Russia initially joined its ally France in the Continental System blockade, but the effect was damaging to Russia’s own trade, and ports were reopened to neutral ships on December 31, 1810, straining the Franco-Russian partnership. On June 24, 1812, Napoleon led an army of 600,000— le Grand Armee , the largest in the history of Europe up to that time—in an invasion of Russia. Unable to defeat such a force, the Russians fell back and adopted a scorched earth policy, burning buildings, crops, orchards and anything else that could be of use to the French.

Napoleon finally engaged the Russians at Borodino in September, an inconclusive battle with high casualties on both sides. On September 15, the French army entered the Russian capital of Moscow, but it was a Pyrrhic victory: the population was gone, and the Russians set fire to the town. For over a month, Napoleon waited for his erstwhile partner to capitulate, but a bitter winter and no means of feeding his troops forced him to abandon Moscow. Freezing weather, starvation, desertion, harassing attacks by Cossacks, and a bloody battle at the Berezina River on November 27 reduced le Grand Armee from 600,000 to less than 100,000. The emperor returned to Paris to strengthen his forces there, but the disaster in Russia and the continuing war in Spain and Portugal had emboldened his enemies.

In the spring of 1813, Britain, Prussia, Portugal, Spain, Russia and Sweden along with minor German states formed the Sixth Coalition of nations allied against France. The emperor gathered his veterans and conscripted new recruits. Initially, he claimed victories at Lutzen and Bautzen and forced a peace that bought him time to raise additional troops, but in August Austria officially joined the coalition, tipping the balance. At the three-day Battle of Leipzig in October, the largest battle of the Napoleonic Wars, the coalition dealt Napoleon a devastating defeat. Ultimately he was forced back behind the Rhine, and an invasion of France was imminent. Napoleon’s field marshals forced him to abdicate on April 11, 1814, and he was banished to the island of Elba.

Napoleon’s Hundred Days

The following March, he escaped and returned to France, where he was still widely regarded as a hero, and assumed his role as emperor, displacing King Louis XVIII. This began a period known as the Hundred Days of Napoleon or simply The Hundred Days (actually 111 days, March 20–July 8, 1815). While he was raising a new army, Austria, Britain, Prussia and Russia agreed to a new coalition to oppose him. Knowing he would soon be vastly outnumbered, Napoleon chose to strike quickly into Belgium where he hoped to inject his army between an Anglo-Dutch force under his old enemy in Spain, the Duke of Wellington, and a Prussian Army under Field Marshal Prince Gebhard von Blücher and defeat each force separately.

In this campaign, however, the French emperor would not have the assistance of his exceptional former chief of staff, Louis Alexandre Berthier, who chose not to rejoin his old commander and instead personally escorted King Louis XVIII to safety. Berthier had been among those who forced Napoleon’s abdication in 1814, believing that the long period of war had to end for the good of France.

After clashes at Ligny and Quatre Bras , Napoleon attacked Wellington’s Anglo-Dutch army near Mont St. Jean, south of the village of Waterloo , Belgium, on June 18, 1815. After hours of bloody fighting, Wellington’s line was close to breaking, but Blücher arrived with 48,000 Prussians in the late afternoon. The battered, outnumbered French army retreated back into France.

Napoleon abdicated a second time and was carried into exile on a British ship to the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic. He died there May 5, 1821, at the age of 51. Claims arose that he had been gradually poisoned with arsenic, but most likely he died of stomach cancer, which also killed his father and sister Pauline. His remains were not returned to France until 1840 when he was interred at Les Invalides in Paris.

Napoleon Bonaparte: A Brief Biography

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• Post date September 24, 2022
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Napoleon Bonaparte was born on August 15, 1769, in Ajaccio, on the Mediterranean island of Corsica. His family had moved there from Italy 14 years earlier. Napoleon was the fourth of eleven children. He had two older sisters, Letizia and Maria Anna (nicknamed “Pauline”).

Napoleon’s mother, Letizia, was a strong and determined woman who had a great influence on her son. His father, Carlo, was a man of weak character who could not control his children.

In 1779, Napoleon was sent to a French military school at Brienne-le-Château. He was an average student, but he did well in mathematics and geography. He was also a good horseman and fencer. In 1784, he entered the Royal Military Academy at Paris. Napoleon did not like the strict discipline at the academy. He was often in trouble for his rebellious behavior.

After graduation, Napoleon was made a lieutenant in the La Fère artillery regiment. In 1791, he was promoted to captain. The following year, he was sent to Corsica to help put down a rebellion against the French government.

In 1793, Napoleon married Josephine de Beauharnais, a beautiful young widow. They had one child, a son named Napoleon Charles, who died in infancy.

In 1796, Napoleon was given command of the French army in Italy. He quickly gained a series of victories against the Austrians. In 1797, he invaded Switzerland. The following year, he invaded Egypt in an attempt to disrupt British trade with India.

In 1799, Napoleon returned to France. He seized power in a coup d’état and became First Consul of the French Republic. In 1804, he was proclaimed Emperor of the French.

As emperor, Napoleon expanded the French empire. He conquered most of Europe, including Austria, Prussia, and Russia. In 1812, he invaded Russia, but was forced to retreat because of the harsh winter. The following year, his army was defeated by a coalition of European nations at the Battle of Waterloo. Napoleon was exiled to the island of Elba. In 1815, he escaped and tried to regain power, but was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo. He was then exiled to the island of Saint Helena, where he died on May 5, 1821.

Frequently asked questions about Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte was one of the most influential figures in European history. He was a general during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and he became the first Emperor of France. Napoleon was a controversial figure, and there are many questions about his life and legacy . Here are some frequently asked questions about Napoleon Bonaparte.

What Was Ironic About The 1804 Crowning Of Napoleon Bonaparte?

What was ironic about the 1804 crowning of Napoleon Bonaparte? The fact that he was crowned by the Pope, when he had previously been excommunicated by the Catholic Church.

Why Did The French People Support Napoleon Bonaparte?

The French people were looking for a strong leader after the French Revolution, and Napoleon Bonaparte fit that bill. He was a great military commander and had a lot of success early on, which endeared him to the French people. He also promised to bring stability to France, which was something the people were yearning for.

How Did Napoleon Bonaparte Restore Social Order?

In the early 1800s, France was in a state of chaos. The people were unhappy with their government, and there were many uprisings. Napoleon Bonaparte was a military general who saw this as an opportunity to take control. He staged a coup and took over the government. Once in power, Napoleon began to restore social order. He made changes to the education system and the legal system. He also created new laws and regulations. These changes helped to improve the lives of the people of France and bring stability to the country.

Was Napoleon Bonaparte A Good Ruler?

Some people may say that Napoleon Bonaparte was a good ruler because he helped to modernize France and he was a very effective military leader. However, others may say that he was a bad ruler because he was a dictator and he started a lot of wars.

Where Is Napoleon Bonaparte Buried?

Napoleon Bonaparte, the French military leader and emperor who conquered much of Europe in the early 19th century, is buried on the island of Saint Helena. He was exiled to Saint Helena in 1815 after his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo and died there in 1821.

Where Was Napoleon Bonaparte Buried?

Napoleon Bonaparte was buried on the island of Saint Helena in the British Overseas Territory of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha. His body was first buried in a tomb on the island, and then moved to Les Invalides in Paris in 1840.

Was Napoleon Bonaparte Short?

There is no definitive answer to this question, as Napoleon’s height is disputed by historians. Some claim that he was 5’2″, while others say he was 5’6″. However, there is evidence to suggest that Napoleon may have been taller than originally thought. For example, his surviving clothing items suggest he was around 5’7″. Therefore, it is likely that Napoleon was somewhere between 5’2″ and 5’7″.

Why Did Napoleon Bonaparte Hide His Hand?

There are a number of theories as to why Napoleon Bonaparte hid his hand. One theory is that he had a deformity that he was self-conscious about. Another theory is that he had developed a skin condition that made his hand look discolored and he was embarrassed by it. Whatever the reason, it is clear that Napoleon Bonaparte had a reason for hiding his hand and it was likely a personal one.

Why Was Napoleon Bonaparte Important To The French Revolution?

Napoleon Bonaparte was a general during the French Revolution. He was important to the Revolution because he was able to lead the French army to many victories against the other European powers that were trying to stop the Revolution. He was also able to take control of the government and establish himself as the leader of France.

Was Napoleon Bonaparte A Dictator?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as it depends on how you define “dictator.” However, many historians would say that Napoleon Bonaparte was a dictator, as he held absolute power in France during his reign. He was not elected by the people, and he did not rule with the consent of the legislature. He made all the decisions himself, and his rule was characterized by repression and terror.

How Did Napoleon Bonaparte Come To Power?

Napoleon Bonaparte came to power in a series of events that started with the French Revolution. The French Revolution was a time of great political and social upheaval in France. It began in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille, a symbol of the monarchy’s power. The Revolution led to the creation of a new constitution and the rise of the Jacobin Club, a political club that supported the Revolution. The Jacobins took control of the government in 1792 and declared war on Austria and Prussia. The Jacobins were overthrown in 1794, and Napoleon Bonaparte came to power in 1799.

What Form Of Government Did Napoleon Bonaparte Lead?

Napoleon’s government was a dictatorship. He made himself the absolute ruler of France. He controlled the government and the military. Napoleon was a brilliant military leader. He conquered most of Europe. Napoleon’s government was eventually overthrown, and he was exiled to the island of Elba.

How Did Napoleon Bonaparte Die?

Napoleon Bonaparte died of stomach cancer on May 5, 1821, at the age of 51. He was exiled to the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean after his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Napoleon’s health began to decline in early 1821, and he became increasingly frail as the months went on. He died surrounded by his family and close friends, with his wife, Marie Louise, by his side.

Where Did Napoleon Bonaparte Die?

Napoleon Bonaparte, the famous French emperor, died on May 5, 1821 on the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean.

What Did Napoleon Bonaparte Accomplish?

Napoleon Bonaparte is one of the most well-known and controversial figures in history. He was a general during the French Revolution and helped lead France to victory in many battles. He also became Emperor of France and ruled for a time. Napoleon made many reforms during his rule, such as creating a new legal system, and he also expanded the French empire. However, he was eventually defeated and exiled. Napoleon is remembered as both a great leader and a tyrant.

What Did Napoleon Bonaparte Do In The French Revolution?

Napoleon Bonaparte was one of the most influential figures in the French Revolution. He was a general who led the French army to many victories, including the Battle of Austerlitz. He also served as the first Consul of France and was eventually crowned Emperor. Napoleon’s reforms helped to modernize France and spread the ideals of the Revolution to other countries.

What Is Napoleon Bonaparte Known For?

Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military leader who rose to prominence during the French Revolution. He was known for his military successes, most notably his invasion of Italy and his defeat of the Egyptian army at the Battle of the Pyramids. He also served as the first Consul of France and was later crowned Emperor of the French. However, his reign was short-lived and he was eventually defeated at the Battle of Waterloo.

If Napoleon Bonaparte got in a time machine and took it to today, what would he do?

If Napoleon Bonaparte got in a time machine and took it to today, he would be amazed by the advances in technology. He would probably be most interested in the military technology and how it has changed warfare. He would also be interested in the political changes that have taken place in the last 200 years.

10 Quotes from Napoleon Bonaparte

1. “Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.”

2. “I am the true founder of the French Empire.”

3. “In politics, an absurdity is not a handicap.”

4. “It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!”

5. “Leaders are born, not made.”

6. “Power is my mistress. I have worked too hard at her conquest to allow anyone to take her away from me.”

7. “Revolution is not a bed of roses.”

8. “The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving.”

9. “The best way to keep one’s word is not to give it.”

10. “There are only two forces that unite men – fear and interest.”

In conclusion…

Napoleon Bonaparte was a great military leader and one of the most influential figures in European history. His successes and failures had a lasting impact on the development of the modern world .

Napoleon Bonaparte was a great military leader whose successes and failures had a lasting impact on the development of the modern world.

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Napoleon Bonaparte: 50 Amazing facts and biography

• Post category: Facts and history
• Post author: Nassie Angadi

Napoleon Bonaparte is one of those figures who remains instantly recognizable even centuries after his death. A formidable French military leader and tactician, he was first and foremost an astute politician, rising from obscurity to become Emperor of France.

In his time, he was adored by the French and much feared by his enemies. Today his legacy remains checkered even in France, with the positives and negatives outweighing each other depending on who you talk to.

So let’s get the facts about Napoleon Bonaparte, an icon in the history of France , for better or for worse. Allons-y!

1. He was born in Corsica.

Napoleon Bonaparte was born on August 15, 1769 in the town of Ajaccio in Corsica. He was the 2nd surviving child of Carlo (Charles) Marie Bonaparte, a lawyer, and Maria Letizia Ramolino, a minor aristocrat.

A small island just off of mainland France, Corsica has a culture of its own. At the time of his birth, the island was not quite French. Just before Napoleon was born, in 1768, it had been ceded to French King Louis XV by the Republic of Genoa (now part of Italy) to pay off some debts.

2. He had to learn to speak French.

In Corsica, Napoleon Bonaparte and his family spoke the local regional dialect , not French . Being next to the Italian Sardinia, the Corsicans at the time were very attached to their own traditions, language, and food. (And indeed, they remain so.)

Napoleon would not learn French until he went to collège (meaning “middle school”). He would keep his Italian accent and his poor spelling in French all his life.

3. He grew up during the French Revolution.

By the time Napoleon came of age, the French Revolution of 1789 was in full swing. He would join the army along with his brothers and work his way up the ranks.

4. His actual height was 5ft5in.

Napoleon’s official height (during his autopsy) was measured at 1.69m, which is about 5 foot 5 inches. While that was not particularly tall, it was not particularly short for that era either.

However, it was a good way for his enemies to mock him, as the Emperor and his army rampaged throughout Europe.

5. He made the bicorne hat famous.

The bicorne hat that Napoleon became famous for was another bit of propaganda. Initially meant to be worn from front to back by officers, Napoleon started wearing it sideways to show solidarity with more junior soldiers who wore it diagonally.

Interestingly, his English nemesis Admiral Horatio Nelson also wore a bicorne hat.

6. He wrote a romance novel.

Along with being military tactician, Napoleon was an aspiring author and a determined romantic. When Napoleon was 26 in 1795, he wrote Clisson et Eugénie , a brief romance novel of 17 pages.

7. He was engaged to Désirée Clary, future Queen of Sweden.

At the age of 26, Napoleon Bonaparte would meet Désirée Clary, the daughter of a minor noble, and would get engaged to her. His older brother Joseph would get engaged to her older sister Julie.

Napoleon would soon break off the engagement though, once he met Josephine, a woman he would fall madly in love with.

Don’t feel bad for Clary though. She would eventually met her future spouse, Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte, another French general and politician who had also worked his way up the ranks along with Napoleon.

In August 1810, Bernadotte’s husband was elected heir to the throne of Sweden and Norway as King Charles XIV John and Désirée was crowned Queen. (The House of Bernadotte continues to rule Sweden .)

8. He met a widow named Josephine.

Born Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie on 23 June 1763 on the island of Martinique, Josephine was the daughter of the owner of a sugar cane plantation.

Josephine would move to France to marry her 1st husband Alexandre de Beauharnais, with whom she had two children. Her husband was an aristocrat who was guillotined during the Reign of Terror.

Josephine was also held for execution, but managed to secure her release. She met Napoleon on  October 15, 1795, as a rather impoverished widow with two young children.

9. He married Josephine de Beauharnais (1st wife).

Napoleon was madly in love and would hurriedly break off relations with Désirée and marry Josephine de Beauharnais on 9 mars 1796, just a few months after meeting her.

On their certificate, the couple falsify their age to erase their 6 year age difference. Josèphine makes herself four years younger and Bonaparte eighteen months older. ( French birth and marriage certificate tracking is very good however, and the difference was well known.)

10. They were happy living in Château Malmaison.

By all accounts, Josephine and Napoleon were very happy in their early years. She purchased a small country house outside of Paris called Château Malmaison in 1799, while Napoleon, still only a general in the army, was off fighting in Egypt.

But Napoleon was not pleased. The property was far more than he wanted to spend. And plus it did not look like a house meant for royalty .

It was a home that she loved however, and Josephine’s daughter Hortense (from a previous marriage) would later say that it was their “delicious spot”. But things were about to change.

11. He became First Consul of France in 1800.

By 1800, Napoleon Bonaparte would be firmly in charge of Paris and France. After rising through the ranks, he nominated as First Consul of France (similar to President of France.)

12. He declared himself Emperor of the French.

In 1804, Napoleon was “voted” Emperor of the French. When Napoleon Bonaparte took control, he decided to strip back some of the Assemblée Nationale’s powers and consolidate his own.

The French revolution was over, and France once again had a monarch. Napoleon was not content however, just being Emperor of France, he wanted all of Europe.

13. He was crowned at Notre Dame de Paris.

Most French monarchs were crowned at the Cathedral of Reims , however Napoleon Bonaparte decided to do things differently.

Among the other grand cathedrals in France , he decided to be crowned at Notre Dame de Paris as a break from the ancien régime and also to demonstrate to Parisians that it was now he who was in charge.

One of the largest paintings in the Louvre Museum is the Consecration of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and the Coronation of his wife Joséphine as Empress.

Completed in 1807 by Jacques-Louis David, his official artist , it depicts the coronation of Napoleon at Notre-Dame de Paris , after Napoleon declared himself Emperor.

A copy of the painting by the same artist hangs in the Palace of Versailles . There are a few “creative liberties” that have been taken by Napoleon and his painter, most notably the addition of his mother, who is sitting on a throne in the center watching.

She had not attended, but Napoleon asked for her to be painted into the tableau anyway.

14. His Mother Letizia Bonaparte hated his wife.

As emperor, Napoleon created a courtesy title for his mother as Madame Mère (literally, “madam mother”).

If you are wondering why Napoleon Bonaparte’s mother would miss his coronation as Emperor, there was a very good reason: his mother hated his wife Josephine and so refused to attend as she didn’t want to watch Josephine crowned Empress.

Letizia Bonaparte was generally quite unimpressed that her son had married a woman 6 years older than him, who was seemingly unable to give him children.

A mother of 13 children herself, she would continue to push Napoleon to divorce Josephine and remarry to produce an heir.

15. He won many famous battles.

Napoleon was known for his military might and innovative tactics. He would traverse the Alps to conquer and pillage large parts of Italy, Austria, Egypt, and other parts of Europe and Africa.

Some of his most famous victories in battle include:

• Battle of the Pyramids, 1798 in Egypt
• Battle of Marengo, 1800 against Austrian troops
• Battle of Austerlitz, 1805 against Russian and Austrian troops
• Battle of Jena-Auerstedt, 1806 against Prussian (German) troops
• Battle of Friedland, 1807 against Prussian (German) troops

16. He had 7 brothers and sisters.

By the time Napoleon was an adult, he had 7 surviving brothers and sisters. As he conquered his way through Europe, he would place them on the vacant thrones available to consolidate his power.

He placed his siblings as follows (from eldest to youngest):

• Joseph – King of Naples, and then King of Spain. He reluctantly abdicated in 1813 and retired in the U.S.
• Lucien – Prince of Canino and Musignano. Lucien rebelled against Napoleon much of his life, but did try to help his brother regain power when Napoleon was in exile.
• Elisa – Princess of Piombino and Lucca and Trand Euchess of Tuscany.
• Louis – King of Holland (1806-1810), and Comte de Saint-Leu.
• Pauline – Princess of Guastalla. Pauline was Napoleon’s favorite sister.
• Caroline – Grand Duchess of Cleves and Berg and later Queen of Naples.
• Jerome – King of Westphalia and Prince of Montfort. The youngest, Jêrome was only 16 when he joined Napoleon’s army.

Many of these titles disappeared after Napoleon was defeated, but each of his siblings and their descendants are retained their title of French Prince and Princess as part of the Imperial family.

It was Napoleon’s sister Caroline Bonaparte and her husband Joachim Murat who purchased and renovated the Palais de l’Elysées as their base in Paris, which is today the official residence of the President of France.

17. His Royal residences were fit for a King.

As Emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte decided that he needed a home that matched his status. The Palace of Versailles , which only 15 years earlier was associated with Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and their excesses, would not do.

He decided to make the Château de Fontainebleau his base instead, distancing himself from the excesses of the previous royal house.

“The true home of kings, the house of ages.”  Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte about Chateau de Fontainebleau

Fontainebleau was the historic seat of former French kings like François I , before Versailles became Versailles, so Napoleon wanted to associate himself with that château. Napoleon had the entire Château refurbished, and added a throne room for himself.

And for a power base in Paris, he made the Palais des Tuileries his official residence in Paris, even installing the Mona Lisa in his bedroom. He also began renovating a northern gallery at the Tuileries which also connected to the Palais du Louvre .

18. He instituted the Napoleonic code.

It was under Napoleon that France got the Code Civil de France (also known as the Code Napoleon) that guaranteed personal liberties, the equality of citizens before the law and the secularity of the Church.

This was a new legal code for France which replaced a complex pre-revolution system. The Napoleonic code detailed everything from the rights of individuals and families to property and criminal conduct.

It wasn’t perfect, women were still considered property, but it established certain basic rights, including the right to work, where a feudal system existed before.

He also set up governing bodies that still exist today, like the Conseil d’État (meaning “Council of State”) that are both a legal adviser of the executive branch and the highest Supreme Court for administrative justice.

19. He was a colonialist.

At the same time as he was establishing a civil code in France, he also brought back slavery in France’s colonies .

As part of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens , slavery was abolished by the French Revolutionaries in 1794 as part of their quest for equality. During its history , France had settled several colonies in the Caribbean and Americas, including Haiti, where a large number of slaves were retained.

However, Napoleon Bonaparte revoked that decree in 1802. At the time, he was still married to Josephine, who had grown up and benefited from the slave system.

France would finally re-abolished slavery in the colonies in 1848 with a general and unconditional emancipation. But not until making Haiti pay substantial reparations, that are still having consequences today.

20. He changed the French National Anthem.

Napoleon Bonaparte disliked the French national anthem, La Marseillaise because of its association with the Revolution since he fancied himself Emperor.

He replaced it with a song called Le Chant du Départ as the official French national anthem. (The Marseillaise was restored, removed, and restored several times before finally being restored after WWII.)

21. He put in place education reforms.

In order to create a new class of leaders, Napoleon reorganized France’s education system . He started primary schools and created a secondary school system (called lycées ) .

He created separate schools for girls (whose education was not a priority until then), although much of the girls’ schooling focused on domestic skills.

The schools for both boys and girls did however focus on learning numbers, writing, and language. More advanced subjects like mathematics, history, geography, physics and botany were also taught.

22. He created labor reforms.

As part of the response to peasants who led the revolution, Napoleon establish a system of labor reforms and a labour court known as the Conseil de Prud’hommes .

Smaller labor courts had existed in Paris before in certain industries, but under Napoleon, this became nationwide and gave employees some recourse against unjust practises.

The Prud’hommes exists in France to this day. Disputes between employer and employee can be taken to Prud’hommes a council of experts will assess the situation, and advise any penalties and reconciliation necessary.

23. He instituted military reforms.

Napoleon carried the idea of merit and fairness into his armies as well. Where before promotions were only given to nobility, under Napoleon’s army hard work and bravery were rewarded.

This idea of gaining rank based merit, instead of nepotism, is what we expect today.

24. He got rid of the metric system.

Gabriel Mouton, a church vicar in Lyon had invented the metric system in 1670. French scientists at the Academy of Sciences of Paris refined it in the 1790s, and it was officially adopted by the French government under the revolutionists in 1795.

Napoleon, however, was not convinced. In 1812, Napoleon abandoned the metric system and largely let people use whichever measures they wanted.

He did let it continue to be taught in school, and it was eventually reinstated in 1840.

25. He gave Jewish citizens full rights.

For centuries, the Jewish people were discriminated against in various parts of Europe. They were made to live in special neighbourhoods, banned from certain professions, and restricted from their synagogues.

Napoleon made Jews full citizens of France, ending all those restrictions, with all the same rights as Catholics. He had also written about the idea of a Jewish homeland in Israel.

26. The Louisiana purchase was his idea.

In 1762, King Louix XV had signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau where where France ceded the State of Louisiana to Spain.

In 1800 Napoleon regained ownership of Louisiana as part of his project to restablish colonies in the Americas. France had already lost Quebec at that point, and had turned its attention further south.

In 1803 however, after a failure to control much of the land, Napoleon would finalize the Louisiana purchase to the United States of America. In return for $15 million dollars, or approximately $18/square mile, the U.S. acquired the territory of Louisiana.

That territory almost doubled the size of the United States, adding the equivalent of 13 states to the Union. Napoleon, on the other hand, could now concentrate his forces and focus on an enemy closer to home, the British.

27. He fought many battles against the British.

With the British islands being right across the English Channel from France, the British were watching Napoleon rampage through Europe with nervousness.

“Between France and England, the best thing is the English Channel.” Famous quote about France and England

For several years, French and British ships would skirmish on the high seas. Napoleon had ideas of invading Britain, and once it became obvious that that was not going to possible, he tried to blockade the UK by restricting trade.

The British succeeded in forming an anti-French coalition consisting of Austria, Russia, Sweden, and Italy, but it was a tenuous coalition.

28. He lost the Battle of Trafalgar.

One of the largest early defeats that Napoleon suffered was in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.

Although, the English admiral Nelson lost his life, the French lost 21 of 33 ships and many troops. Following the battle, the British Royal Navy had the upper hand and Napoleon abandoned any plans to invade England, turning to mainland Europe instead.

Just 3 months later, on December 2, 1805, would be Napoleon’s greatest victory, when he defeated the combined Austrian and Russian armies in the Battle of Austerlitz.  Today the Gare d’Austerlitz, a metro station in Paris , remembers that famous victory.

29. He got rid of the French Revolutionary Calendar.

During the revolution, the revolutionaries in charge decided to come up with a new republican calendar. Each day in the new French Revolutionary Calendar was divided into 10 hours, each hour into 100 minutes, and each decimal minute into 100 seconds.

By the time Napoleon Bonaparte became First Consul of France in 1799, the French Revolutionary Calendar had already been in effect for 6 years. Since he had a habit of going around conquering his European neighbors, the new calendar was exported to other countries under French rule, including parts of Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy.

The week was now 9 days long, instead of 7 and people had to work a lot longer before a weekend. And there were plenty of other problems .

Napoleon decided he had bigger fish to fry than to convince local populations that the French Republican calendar was a fabulous idea. He finally abolished the calendar on 9 September 1805, with a Décret Impérial.

30. His religious reforms involved kidnapping the Pope.

Napoleon was not a particularly religious man. Before the 1789 revolution, it was the King and the Catholic church that dictated the lives of ordinary people.

Along with deposing the nobility, the revolutionaries were also claiming lands and property of the Roman Catholic church in France, as belonging to the French state.

By the time Napoleon came to power, the role of the church in France was vastly reduced. You will notice in the painting of the coronation, it is Napoleon crowning Josephine, not the Pope, as he did not consider the Pope to be of a status higher than himself.

More than that, when Napoleon was actively campaigning in Italy, he defeated papal troops and took the Catholic Pope Pius VI as prisoner. Pope Pius VI was held in Valence where he died on August 29, 1799.

Napoleon signed the Concordat of 1801 to restore the place of the church to a certain extent, but without returning the lands.

Not content, when the successor Pope Pius VII tried to excommunicate him, Napoleon had him kidnapped as well and brought to Château de Fontainebleau where he would remain until Napoleon was defeated.

31. He instituted several public holidays in France.

Napoleon may not have been overly religious, but he did want to get the population on his side. In 1802, he established 4 religious days as national holidays , one for each season:

• Ascension in spring ( May )
• Assumption in summer ( August )
• All Saints in autumn ( November )
• Christmas in winter ( December )

32. He plundered artworks and the Rosetta stone.

Napoleon’s plundering across Europe and Egypt led to him “acquiring” a lot of artwork.

For example, one of his peace treaties compelled Italian cities to contribute pieces of art and heritage to Napoleon’s “parades of spoils”. These items were then placed the Louvre Museum .

Originally the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel in front of the Louvre museum had the 4 horses from Saint Marc’s basilica in Venice on top of them. Those were returned after the defeat of Napoleon, and copies installed.

It was also Napoleon’s soldiers that found the Rosetta stone in Egypt. This was taken by the British after his defeat and now sits in the British museum in London.

Other artworks acquired continue to remain in France. The Louvre was even briefly renamed Musée Napoleon , until his downfall.

33. He divorced Josephine because she couldn’t give him a child.

Caught up in politics and warfare, Napoleon and Josephine separated after 14 years of marriage.

Napoleon’s desire to have biological children combined with Josephine’s inability to conceive again, meant that the couple divorced on 15th of December, 1809.

As part of the settlement, Josephine received Malmaison and an annual pension of 5 million francs. She continued to enjoy the home until her death in 1814.

34. He loved his stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais.

Josephine had two children from her 1st marriage, the older being Eugène who was adopted by Napoleon on 12 January 1806. However, he was excluded from succession to the French Empire.

He commanded the Napoleon’s army in Italy during the Napoleonic Wars, and was Viceroy of the Kingdom of Italy under his stepfather. He was given the title Prince of France and also Prince of Venise.

He would marry Princess Augusta Amelia, daughter of King Maximilian Ist of Bavaria, an ally of France. Their descendants would eventually marry into the various royal families of Europe, although Eugène himself refused all new titles and benefits after the divorce of his mother and Napoleon.

35. His 2nd wife was Marie Louise, Duchess of Parma.

Napoleon’s 2nd marriage was an arranged marriage, compared to the grand love he had for Josephine.

She was the eldest child of Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor and Emperor of Austria, and the marriage was meant to bring peace. They got married in 1810, the year after his divorce and she gave birth to a son on 20 March 1811.

However in 1812, after Napoleon’s failed invasion of Russia, Austria and other European powers resumed hostilities towards France.

36. His son Napoléon François Joseph Charles died young.

Napoleon’s son was named Napoléon François Joseph Charles Bonaparte. Born in 1811, he was only 3 years old when Napoleon abdicated the 1st time.

Napoleon intended to surrender in favor of his son, but since the child was so young, Napoleon II only “ruled” for a few weeks.

He moved to his mother’s native Vienna in Austria and died young of tuberculosis at the age of 21 in 1832, some 11 years after his father’s death.

Napoleon II was buried in a tomb in Les Invalides, with the title of King of Rome that his father had bestowed upon him. The tomb of his father stands a few feet away.

37. His step-daughter Hortense de Beauharnais would give him an heir.

It would be Napoleon’s step daughter Hortense who would leave the most lasting legacy. The daughter of Josephine from her 1st marriage, she would marry Napoleon’s brother, Louis Bonaparte.

So she was not only Napoleon’s step-daughter but also his sister-in-law. She was initially reluctant, but ceded to Napoleon’s wishes in 1802 at the age of 19.

Louis Bonaparte would be made King of Holland in 1806, making Hortense queen. They disliked each other, but managed to produce 3 sons. It would be their 3rd son who would go on to be Emperor Napoleon III of France .

38. He commissioned the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

The Arc de Triomphe on the Champs Elysées , as well as a 2nd one that is standing in front of the Louvre, were both commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1806 to commemorate his victories.

His defeat by the British meant that he never saw it finished. It was finally completed in 1836, and become a rallying point for both French and foreign armies.

39. He fought a disastrous battle against the Russians.

In 1812, Napoleon launched an invasion against the Russians, as a premptive strike against a possible Russian alliance with England.

His army was badly defeated by the cold and Russian troops and had to retreat. Napoleon had now succeeded in uniting much of Europe uniting against him.

40. He lost the Battle of Paris.

By 1813, the Austrian, Prussian, Russian, and other armies began invaded France on its northern border. The Battle of Paris was fought on March 30, 1814.

After a day of fighting in the suburbs of Paris, the French surrendered on March 31, before Napoleon could reach the capital.

41. His 1st exile was to the island of Elba.

With the French army overrun, Napoleon signed his surrender at the Château de Fontainebleau in April 1814. He initially abdicated in favour of his 3-year-old son on April 4. The Allies rejected this offer, forcing Napoleon to abdicate unconditionally on April 6.

He was exiled to the island of Elba. His favorite sister Pauling and his mother joined him during his exile to keep him company.

42. He made a comeback called “The Hundred days”.

But Napoleon was not done plotting. On 26 February 1815, when the British and French guard ships were absent, he slipped away on board the French brig Inconstant with some 1,000 men and landed at Golfe-Juan, between Cannes and Antibes, on 1 March 1815.

He avoided much of royalist Provence by taking a route through the Alps to head back to Paris with his army. That route today is marked as the Route Napoléon .

His return to power from eleven months of exile, lasted a period of 110 days.

43. He was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo.

On June 15, 1815 began the Battle of Waterloo on the northern border of France, in Belgium.

The coalition consisted of soldiers from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Hanover, Brunswick, and Nassau, under the command of the the English Duke of Wellington and Prussian Marshal von Blücher.

At day’s end, the war-weary French army had disintegrated. Napoleon instead of remaining in the field, returned to Paris to try to regain military and political support from the war-weary French.

44. His abdication restored the Bourbon monarchy.

Right in the garden entrance of the Palais de l’Elysées , home of the French President, is the desk that Napoleon Bonaparte used to sign his abdication and surrender to the British, along with a copy of the letter.

Napoleon abdicated on 22 June 1815 in favour of his son Napoleon II, now 4 years-old. 

However the UK-Prussian coalition insisted on the Bourbon dynasty being restored, with Louis XVIII as King. He was the younger brother of Louis XVI who had survived the revolution, after the death of the King and Queen Marie-Antoinette .

45. He hoped to retire in America.

When Napoleon signed his abdication letter, he was actually hoping to be able to move the United States.

On 25 June, 1815 Napoleon left Paris for the final time and after staying at Château Malmaison , and left for the coast hoping to reach the United States of America. (Josephine had already passed away by this time, dying in 1814.)

46. Exile and mysterious death on the island of Saint Helena.

Napoleon was caught by the British, who feared another resurrection, and was exiled to the island of Saint Helena. In 1821, this is where he died under rather mysterious circumstances.

The British doctors treating him said he died of stomach cancer, while a local Corsican doctor blamed it on gall bladder problems and ulcers caused by stress.

Napoleon was also known to have carried a vial of poison at times. He died on May 5, 1821 at the age of 51.

47. Initial burial in Saint Helena.

He was initially buried on St. Helena, before being exhumed 19 years later.

“I wish my ashes to rest on the banks of the Seine among the people of France whom I so much loved“. Napoleon Bonaparte’s last will and testament

Decades after Napoleon Bonaparte died in exile, he remained quite popular in France. During royal restoration, King Louis-Philippe decided to bring his body back from Saint-Hélena to be buried in Paris according to his wishes.

He was given a state funeral in 1840, and his body was kept in the Invalides until a tomb fit for an Emperor could be built.

48. His tomb is at Les Invalides in Paris.

It would be in 1861 that Napoleon was finally laid to rest in Les Invalides by his nephew Napoleon III, receiving the highest of honors as Emperor of France buried under the Dome of Les Invalides .

The sarcophagus was put up on a green granite pedestal and contains six coffins all nested within each other. One made of iron, another of mahogany, two others of lead, one of ebony and finally the last one of oak.

Records show that Napoleon was buried in his Colonel’s uniform (of the cavalry of the Guard) which bears his sash of the Légion d’Honneur . His famous hat, the sideways bicorne , rests on his legs.

Around the tomb, carved into the walls are the ten bas-reliefs sculpted by Pierre Charles Simart between 1846 and 1853, retracing the achievements of the Consulate and the Empire. They include Napoleon often shirtless with him featuring:

• the code civil
• with a crown of sunshine (meant to evoke the Sun King )
• dressed as a Roman Julius Caesar

49. His nephew became Emperor Napoleon III.

After the death of Napoleon Bonaparte, the British restored the French monarchy by putting on the throne a series of minor members of the House of France, the last of whom would be Louis Philippe (known as the last King of France).

Napoleon’s nephew however, Charles Louis Napoléon Bonaparte was waiting in the wings. He was the son of Louis Bonaparte and Hortense de Beauharnais and would become known as Napoleon III .

After a couple of “small” revolutions and abdications in between, he finally seizes power in 1851 and declares himself Emperor.

He was a generally efficient monarch, working to moderize France, boosting the economy and expanding the merchant navy. And he gave carte blanche to an architect named Baron Haussman to redraw the map of Paris , by razing much of the center to the ground, and building much of the Paris we see today.

Napoleon III’s reign would not last however. Prussia (as Germany was then known) was gaining in power and the British did not trust the nephew of the enemy who had brought them so many years of war. Short of allies and growing older, he would surrender in 1870 to the Prussians and die in Germany.

With a series of Germanic invasions, a couple of World Wars, and many other upheavals, there would never again be a King (or Emperor) of France.

50. Bonaparte’s family lives on today.

Although, Napoleon’s direct line ended when his son died, there are plenty of Bonapartes who have descended from his siblings.

One of the claimants to the French throne, Prince Jean-Christophe Napoleon Bonaparte, the great-great-great nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was in the news in 2019 for getting married at Les Invalides in Paris.

He happened to be marrying Olympia, the great-granddaughter of Karl I of the Austrian Habsburgs, a descendent of Napoleon Bonaparte’s arch enemy.

If you enjoyed that article, you may like to read more about French history here. A bientôt!

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History Books » Historical Figures

The best books on napoleon, recommended by andrew roberts.

Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts

How did Napoleon Bonaparte, an upstart Corsican, go on to conquer half of Europe in the 16 years of his rule? Was he a military genius? And was he really that short? Historian Andrew Roberts , author of a bestselling biography of Napoleon , introduces us to the books that shaped how he sees l'Empereur —including little-known sources from those who knew Napoleon personally. Read more history book recommendations on Five Books

Interview by Charles J. Styles

The Campaigns of Napoleon by David G Chandler

Talleyrand by Duff Cooper

With Eagles to Glory: Napoleon and His German Allies in the 1809 Campaign by John H Gill

Private Memoirs Of The Court Of Napoleon by Louis François Joseph Bausset-Roquefort

With Napoleon in Russia: Memoirs of General de Caulaincourt, Duke of Vicenza by Armand de Caulaincourt

1 The Campaigns of Napoleon by David G Chandler

2 talleyrand by duff cooper, 3 with eagles to glory: napoleon and his german allies in the 1809 campaign by john h gill, 4 private memoirs of the court of napoleon by louis françois joseph bausset-roquefort, 5 with napoleon in russia: memoirs of general de caulaincourt, duke of vicenza by armand de caulaincourt.

I f you were to explain the significance of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) to someone who knew nothing about him, what would you say?

I argue that although he didn’t have much to do with the French Revolution itself, as he was too young, he nonetheless kept the best bits of the Revolution—equality before the law, religious tolerance, meritocracy—for France and the countries that France conquered. The Code Napoleon was still in effect in the Rhineland until 1900, for example, and it underlies modern European legal systems to this day.

He got rid of the worst bits, like the mass guillotining, the Reign of Terror, the various mad ideas they had like the ten-day week, abolishing Christianity, and so on. He was the person who brought France into the 19th century with huge reforms of administration and finance. He was a moderniser.

You mentioned his relationship with the Revolution. I think there’s something paradoxical about it. He’d declare things like “I am the Revolution”, and the Napoleonic Code did enshrine revolutionary principles like civic equality into law. But didn’t he also curtail the rights of women and reinstate slavery in the Caribbean sugar colonies? Some would argue that the main constitution itself was structurally undemocratic, with an unelected senate, even if it was put to the people in a plebiscite.

The Code Napoleon was not good for women , but then they were hardly over-endowed with rights before the Revolution. He went on to abolish slavery , of course, not once but twice. He did reinstitute it in 1802, but abolished it again in 1814. So, he had an in-out/in-out policy with slavery. When I say a ‘moderniser’, I mean a moderniser in the context of the times, not a moderniser in the context of Tony Blair.

Joining the dots between the French Revolution and Napoleon’s ascendency, how did France go from establishing a Republic and executing their king to welcoming an emperor barely a decade later?

I think his military successes first in Italy in 1796 and also in 1800 as well as his creation of the civil code were essential to understanding how they able to recognise that he wasn’t a king . Being an emperor and being a king were very different things. They were perfectly happy to have an empire, which they saw as being based on republican principles, with a Napoleon rather than Bourbon at the top of the tree.

So, there wasn’t any lingering republican resistance?

No, there was—especially in the army. The French army was considered to be highly republican. There was resistance from people like Marshal Bernadotte to Napoleon calling himself an emperor in December 1804. But it was not unpopular in the rest of the country.

I really enjoyed your own biography of Napoleon , which was awarded the Grand Prix of the Fondation Napoléon. It’s an excellent read and continues to be an international bestseller in both UK and US editions. It was also one of the first books to build upon the publication of some 33,000 of Napoleon’s letters. I’m curious to know what you found to be the most striking revelations from them. Did they overturn any major myths?

There are still dozens of myths and misconceptions about Napoleon. But what I came across most powerfully among the letters was his capacity for compartmentalising his mind. He could completely ignore what was happening at the time, even during or after battles or when the Kremlin was burning, and concentrate on running parts of his empire, or on setting up the rules of a girls’ school, or on telling a prefect that he shouldn’t be seen at the opera with his mistress. He had this incredible capacity for, as he put it, pulling out a drawer in his mind, dealing with whatever was in it, and then closing it again.

If we’re talking about myths, I suppose the main one to get out of the way is his height!

Your first book choice is The Campaigns of Napoleon by David Chandler. Can you tell us about this one and why you’ve recommended it?

It’s a totally comprehensive history of all of Napoleon’s campaigns. Chandler wrote it, I think, in the late 60s, and yet it still holds up very well as an overall history of Napoleon’s fighting. Perfectly understandably, it doesn’t include everything else about Napoleon—the politics, the personality, the 27 mistresses and all the rest of it—nor is it intending to do that. It’s just doing the military side of it all. But it is an absolutely encyclopaedic run-through of all of Napoleon’s battles.

So, this is a must-have for military history buffs?

It is indeed. David Chandler reissued it several times and updated it with the latest thought on Napoleon’s battles. If there was something new said on the Battle of Austerlitz or something like that, he would then reissue the book with that new information in it. So, you want to buy the last iteration of it before David died.

Napoleon is often labelled a “military genius”. Notwithstanding his ultimate defeat, what is the best way to support that judgement?

I think the fact that he was able to fight so many different kinds of battles. The reason that he’s a genius is that he managed to win battles whether he outnumbered the enemy or was outnumbered by the enemy, whether he was moving forwards or backwards, whether or not he was having his right or left flank enveloped, or whether he was enveloping the enemies. Or sometimes he could do a double-envelopment, which is one of the most difficult manoeuvres in warfare. He managed to pull that off.

“It is an absolutely encyclopaedic run through of all of Napoleon’s battles”

Napoleon had equal dexterity when it came to commanding infantry, cavalry, and artillery, even though he was himself educated as an artilleryman. He’s also extremely good in coalition warfare—in striking at the hinge between his enemies but also keeping his own coalitions in order. His invasion of Russia involved something like 20 countries. You have, therefore, a commander who is incredibly dextrous and capable of adapting to whatever military circumstance he’s facing.

In terms of his military weaknesses, we undoubtedly have naval warfare, but he also had difficulty with guerrilla insurgencies in the Peninsular War.

That’s right and, of course, the guerrilla insurgencies in the Russian campaign as well. He was no good at sea. At all. He just didn’t understand how ships worked. That was a huge lacuna in his capacity and his knowledge. As is what we now call “asymmetrical warfare”, where the enemy doesn’t actually put up an army in the field.

Would you say Napoleon was deluded about his own naval capabilities?

Yes. He didn’t recognise that he was rubbish at sea at all. He thought that you could tell an admiral to do things at sea in much the same way that you could tell a general to do things on land. But, of course, the whole process is very very different—not least because of the wind!

There were various points in your book where Napoleon is still trying to fund naval expansion and is putting men out in ships for warfare despite them never having been at sea before.

That’s right. To give him his due, though, he was up against the Royal Navy which was at the peak of its efficiency. Britain was putting one third of its national spend into the navy. With admirals like the Earl of St Vincent and Collingwood and obviously Nelson, they had endless extremely talented admirals and an extremely can-do attitude towards maritime fighting in the period of fighting sail. Napoleon was really up against an absolutely superb organisation in the Royal Navy. One has to give him his due, but there are no Napoleonic naval victories.

The Napoleonic Wars are very complex and involve coalitions taking on Napoleon at different points. How much can we say with generality about what provoked them?

Here was somebody who was a profoundly radical force that each of these legitimist monarchies like the Hapsburgs of Austria and the Romanovs of Russia and the Hohenzollerns of Prussia were extremely nervous about. They saw what had happened to the Bourbons in France, and they didn’t want it to happen at home. So, this cold wind of modernisation that Napoleon unleashed on Europe was something that they were very keen to try to . . . whatever you do to a wind. That’s the reason.

So, he has inherited international hostility already because of the Revolution?

That’s right, yes. But also, they didn’t see him as a legitimate monarch. There were no ‘Bonapartes’ before him. His statement that he wanted to be the Rudolf of his dynasty, i.e. the founding father like Rudolf Hapsburg had been, was seen to be impossibly pretentious—not least because Rudolf came from the 13th century and they were in the 18th century.

There are two cases of Napoleon launching an offensive war. The rest of the time, people are declaring war on him. So, would you say this image of Napoleon stomping across Europe, declaring war on everybody, annexing their territory and so on, is completely wrong?

Yes, completely wrong. He started the Peninsular War and he started the 1812 Russian campaign. Other than that, each of the wars was started by the coalitions against him.

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And the cases where Napoleon does initiate a war seem largely to do with enforcing the ‘Continental System’—his attempt to weaken Britain economically by blocking trade—rather than building an empire for empire’s sake.

Precisely, yes. He didn’t believe in empire for empire’s sake; he recognised that he could overstretch French resources very dangerously and very easily. But he did want to try to force England to the negotiating table. The way he thought he could do that was to hit us in our pocket and try to cut us off from all European markets.

That’s why he invaded Portugal, which was unwilling to take part in the Continental System—being a very old ally of England’s, going back to 1383—and it’s also why, ultimately, he invaded Russia after the tsar ripped up the Tilsit agreement and started trading openly with Britain. It’s a fascinating thing that, as you say, the two aggressive wars that Napoleon started began for mercantile protectionist reasons. It was to try to force the merchants of London to put pressure on the Whig and Tory governments to make peace with him.

But the problem with enforcing this policy of economic strangulation against the Brits was their sea power.

Exactly. When you can land anywhere at all, when you can set up various places off the coast of Italy and off the coast of Germany which are effectively massive freebooting piracy operations of free-trade in everything, it’s just something that is not going to work. His attempt to stimulate local production and an industrial revolution in France was also something that never truly got off the ground.

Britain and France are continuously at war from 1803 onwards until Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, a period of war unmatched in any of the other coalitions. What do you think is the main motivation for why the Brits are so uncompromising?

Let’s move on to your next book. This is Duff Cooper’s biography of the diplomat Talleyrand, whose political life encompasses the rise and fall of Napoleon and beyond.

Talleyrand had a totally extraordinary political life. He supported six different separate regimes in his career and, naturally, got a reputation for being a turncoat. Some people have argued, including Duff Cooper in this brilliant biography, that he did have some central messages that he believed all his life—like liberalism and an affection for the English-style constitution. But the key reason to read this book is that it’s literature as much as history. It’s a beautifully written evocation of an era that Duff Cooper, having been British ambassador to Paris, knew well and actually saw the last glimmers of.

It’s incredible that Talleyrand flees the Reign of Terror, goes to England and then to America, returns to France in 1796 and manages to become foreign minister within a year.

And stays foreign minister or in the diplomatic sphere in some way or another for the rest of his life. He thereby met almost all the important people in Europe and was at the table when all the great decisions were made. He was born an aristocrat and was later an unfrocked bishop. He had a lame foot rather like Byron and Goebbels which apparently turns you into a sex maniac; he turned his niece into his mistress which I think today would have him defenestrated but, nonetheless, no one seemed to hold that against him either.

What does the book tell us about the relation between Talleyrand and Napoleon? What are the main ways we can trace his influence on Napoleon as foreign minister or vice-elector?

It tells us that it was always rocky. Napoleon, quite rightly, didn’t trust him. Talleyrand was working especially with the Russians behind Napoleon’s back. Despite being extremely witty and obviously wonderful company, he was a dangerous person to have working for you. Talleyrand generally thought that France should be at peace and, of course, that’s very difficult when you’re the foreign minister of a conqueror.

I don’t see that you can call Napoleon a warmonger given that, as we’ve said, of the seven wars of the coalitions he only started two. But I think there was a legitimist jihad against him and against the French Revolution. And he had to fight those. But, overall, Talleyrand was someone who, as a good negotiator and a diplomat, wanted peace.

And was willing to betray Napoleon’s military secrets in the process?

He was willing to betray absolutely everybody in the process. It wasn’t just Napoleon; he betrayed five different regimes in the course of his life. I’m certain that had he lived any longer, he would have betrayed the July Monarchy as well.

It’s surprising that when Napoleon found out Talleyrand was selling military secrets to his enemies, he didn’t exile or execute him.

This is another reason to recognise that Napoleon is not a proto-Hitler in the way he’s been portrayed by many British historians. If he were a proto-Hitler, he would have shot Talleyrand and Fouché (his police minister) years before. Napoleon was a dictator politically, in that he dictated the laws of France and what happened. But I don’t think he has anything in common with the 20th-century dictators like Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler , and Stalin.

But what about atrocities like executing thousands of prisoners of war in Jaffa, for instance?

When you say “for instance”, that implies that there were 20 or 30 Jaffas but there weren’t. There’s one at Jaffa and then, after that, in 1796 in Padua, Italy, he also let the troops run riot. But other than that, there just aren’t the mass executions. There aren’t the 40,000 people who died during the Reign of Terror, for example.

“Napoleon was a dictator politically in that he dictated the laws of France and what happened. But I don’t think he has anything in common with the 20th-century dictators”

I go into Jaffa in some detail in my book about how the men who he executed had earlier promised to fight against France. And then, six weeks later, they were captured fighting against France. According to the very harsh rules of law in the late eighteenth century, they forfeited their lives.

There’s a stereotype about Napoleon being indifferent to the immense human cost incurred by trying to establish French hegemony in Europe. Do you think this is misguided?

Yes, I think it’s hugely misguided. I think that commanders throughout history have had to harden their hearts to the inevitable losses made, but I don’t think he ever threw men into battle willy-nilly. He was one of the great commanders in history and one of the great soldiers of all time. Great soldiers don’t do that. And he was personally affected. There are times when he’s in tears in his tent after a battle, in the same way that Wellington was.

The idea of him being some cold-hearted unemotional figure profoundly misunderstands him, as does the idea of him being humourless. Throughout my book, there are something like 80 or 90 Napoleon jokes. He was constantly making humorous remarks that even 200 years later remain extremely funny.

I enjoyed the one where, in the midst of battle, an officer has his helmet thrown off by the impact of a cannonball, only for Napoleon to casually remark “It’s a good job you’re not any taller.”

Let’s move on to your third book. This is With Eagles to Glory: Napoleon and His German Allies in the 1809 Campaign by John H. Gill.

This is a tremendously detailed military history of the Danube campaign of 1809. This was a very important campaign because it knocked the Austrians out of the Napoleonic Wars for the third time. The only way for them to deal with Napoleon after that was for the archduchess Marie-Louise to marry Napoleon and try to bring him into the system like that. He fought a lightning campaign up the Danube, capturing Vienna, fighting battles such as Aspern-Essling and Wagram. This is Napoleon at his classic best. You can see him in this book just outmaneuvering the Austrian army again and again.

One of the distinctive things about this book is that it drew a lot of attention to the 30,000 German troops fighting on behalf of Napoleon.

Yes, this book is an important corrective to the idea that Napoleon’s forces were all French. They certainly weren’t. When Napoleon invaded Russia, only something like 55% of his army were French. He invaded Russia with 615,000 men which was the same size as Paris at the time. It’s very important to see the Napoleonic Wars as coalition wars, both on his side and against him. The book does lots of other things as well, but it certainly underlines that very important factor about Napoleon’s wars.

These soldiers were all supplied from the Confederation of the Rhine. Can you tell us about that and when it was established?

It was established at the time of the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire in August 1806. After the Holy Roman Empire vaporised out of existence, it became Napoleon’s tool—his vehicle—for bringing together the north German states. He called himself the “Protector” of the Confederation. They stayed as such for nine years or so before it itself collapsed at the time of the 1813 campaign. The battles of Leipzig and Dresden were pretty much the death-knell for the Confederation of the Rhine.

I want to ask about military culture and attitudes towards Napoleon among soldiers from the client states. Presumably the German troops didn’t have the same patriotic fervour motivating them as French soldiers, but they weren’t indifferent either.

There’s a huge difference. Some of them some of the time are just as enthusiastic about Napoleon as the French. The Polish lancers, for example, believed that Napoleon was going to make Poland an independent state and give it its own sovereignty for the first time since it had been sliced up in the partitions. And so, they were incredibly excited about fighting for Napoleon. In fact, Napoleon is the only individual named in the Polish national anthem. That’s a good one for a pub quiz!

Your last two books are written by people who had great proximity to Napoleon. Let’s look at Private Memoirs Of The Court Of Napoleon by Louis François Joseph Bausset-Roquefort. This seems a fairly unknown book.

Yes, it’s a very little-known book but an extremely interesting one. Bausset was Napoleon’s palace chamberlain who followed him around the campaigns and lived in his palaces. He knew the family very well indeed and wrote these memoirs even though it was dangerous to do that once the Bourbons had been restored. He was still an admirer of Napoleon and is the living personification of the untruth of the epithet that “no man is a hero to his valet.”

Bausset definitely did admire Napoleon—not blind hero-worship by any means, but he was somebody who saw Napoleon for what he was. This book explodes many of the myths about Napoleon being a vicious and unpleasant individual. Instead, he comes across as a good employer, a witty man, and someone who had normal human emotions.

I suppose it says a lot about a person when all of your personal servants are begging to go into exile with you.

Well, exactly. And not just any old exile. One could understand why they might have wanted to go to Elba, which is a perfectly nice, warm, pleasant place. One would go on holiday to Elba, but nobody would go on holiday to Saint Helena. This is a windswept, godforsaken, tiny, eight-by-ten-mile island plopped bang in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It takes six days by boat to get there from Cape Town, or at least it did before the airport came in. And a very boring journey it is too, I can tell you. And these 21 servants were basically fighting each other for the right to accompany into exile. It shows the charisma of the man.

You mentioned that Bausset goes with him on the campaigns, but what do we find out about Napoleon in a more domestic setting?

That he was a kind husband and a loving father. He was not the domestic monster that the Bourbon literature has been so keen to present him as; many books, I’m afraid, have taken it for granted to be true.

There are some quite eccentric arrangements in Napoleon’s imperial household as well. I’m thinking of his first wife Josephine’s menagerie.

Yes, having orangutans around at lunchtime, zebras in the fields, and black swans at Malmaison. That was her idea, of course, but he indulged it and paid for it. But having exotic animals at that time was very much a royal pursuit and it had been for years. I think Cosimo III de’ Medici had a hippopotamus or something along those lines. It was a way of proving your wealth and status to have unusual animals around. Josephine did actually dress the orangutan in a chemise and have it come to tea parties.

You mentioned that this was to flaunt wealth and status. Was that a slightly sore thing to do considering the tensions building up to the Revolution?

Let’s go on to your final choice. This is the Memoirs of General de Caulaincourt, Duke of Vicenza.

These are fascinating. Caulaincourt was the ambassador to Russia and was also Napoleon’s master of the horse. He was an aristocrat, born and bred. At least according to his memoirs, he was the person who informed Napoleon not to invade Russia. The memoirs were only published in 1935, and there’s no reason why he should have lied in them, owing to the fact that they were never going to be published in his lifetime.

Once he had warned Napoleon, he came with him and was the only person on the sledge that accompanied Napoleon back to France from the catastrophe of the 1812 campaign. It’s in his sledge that we get Napoleon saying “from the sublime to the ridiculous is just one small step.” The memoirs are immensely well-written, encapsulating and pretty crushing for Napoleon’s reputation with regard to the 1812 campaign.

So, it’s not a panegyric?

Not in the slightest. But equally it’s not a denunciation. Caulaincourt stayed with Napoleon up until the 1814 abdication and is a trustworthy source. He’s not anti-Napoleon. It seems that he kept scraps of paper that he used as his notes for this book. It’s a pretty fabulous and invaluable source for the period.

The Russia campaign is regarded as one of the worst defeats in military history. Can you give an outline of the factors that made it so catastrophic?

Napoleon went into Russia on June 21, 1812 with 615,000 men, and by the time he crossed the river Niemen back in the other direction in December, he had lost over half a million of those men. In that sense, you have to go back to the ancient world to see such an enormous military catastrophe.

“Napoleon went into Russia on 21 June 1812 with 615,000 men. By the time he crossed the river Niemen back in the other direction in December, he had lost over half a million of those men”

In a nutshell, the reason was that he was drawn further and further into Russia. He captured Moscow, something that Hitler never did, but he stayed there too long. He won a battle called Maloyaroslavets and decided the next day to retreat back via Borodino, which was a big battle that he’d won on 7 September. It turned out to be the wrong route back and his army was encompassed by blizzards. Although he won each of the formal engagements, the army was swallowed up by the snows of Russia. It’s a story of cannibalism and utter despair and disaster, with a few flashes of redemption such as the crossing of the Berezina river. Otherwise, it’s up there with Xenophon.

We’ve mentioned it already, but it’s important to keep in mind that Napoleon wasn’t marching on Russia to try and annex it. He was trying to force Russia’s compliance with the Continental System.

Yes, he had no territorial desires. He had an army twice the size of the Russian one, and had defeated the Russians twice before. Napoleon only intended to fight on the outskirts; he only intended to go in 50 miles or so and wanted a three-week campaign. Instead, it turned out to be a six-month campaign and carried on for literally thousands of miles there and back. It’s a classic example of mission creep.

The Russians also pursued a scorched earth policy, rather like they did in 1941 and 1942, which meant that there was mass starvation. Napoleon lost 100,000 of the troops of his central thrust to typhus—a horrible disease where a louse will bury itself into your skin and then defecate in your skin and then die. You then die about four days later in immense pain. It’s a horrible way to go.

With armies in those days, everyone had lice. If the weather’s too cold for you to change your clothes more than once every six weeks or so, then you’re going to get lice. The soldiers all huddled together, very close to one another, because it was so cold outside. So, their lice jumped from one soldier to another. There wasn’t a single person, including the emperor, who didn’t have lice. They didn’t work out a cure for typhus until 1911; it wasn’t properly diagnosed until over a century later. It was, in every way, an absolute nightmare of a campaign.

It’s largely remembered for the merciless winter, but the immense heat of the summer advance was almost as damaging.

That killed a lot of horses. And, of course, it’s almost entirely a horse-and-bullock-drawn invasion. The heat and the thirst were appalling on the way into Russia, yes. It was biblical.

There are three more years before Waterloo in 1815 but, in your view, was the Russian campaign the turning point?

Yes. Up until 1811, Napoleon was the master of Europe. From December 1812 onwards, he was on the skids. You can’t lose half a million men and not expect your throne to topple.

But he went out fighting.

He did. The 1814 campaign involved small numbers of men but, nonetheless, he won four battles in five days there. He was back to his old form. These were significant, rather brilliant military victories. But, in the end, with the whole of Europe against him and invading, he was fought to a standstill and then very comprehensively defeated at the Battle of Waterloo.

Just to end, what do you consider to be Napoleon’s greatest achievements that have endured?

I think the beauty of Paris is very largely down to him. He rebuilt Paris. We love going and taking our loved ones there and crossing the four bridges that he built and seeing the fountains and great buildings like the Madeleine Church. That’s a testament to him. He designed the Arc de Triomphe , but it was only built after his death. Although as an Englishman I prefer English common law, nonetheless the whole of French and European law is much more closely built on the Napoleonic Code than anything that had gone before, including Roman law. Napoleon is someone who every Frenchman should be proud of. Other things like the Légion d’honneur and the Conseil d’État are still around. In fact, the numbering of its houses in its streets from the Seine outwards is all down to him. There are also the reservoirs. Even 200 years after his death, it’s difficult to imagine Paris or France without the influence of Napoleon Bonaparte.

October 28, 2019

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Andrew Roberts is a British historian and journalist. He is a Visiting Professor at the Department of War Studies, King's College London, a Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and a Lehrman Institute Distinguished Lecturer at the New York Historical Society. He has written or edited nineteen books—including internationally bestselling biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte and Winston Churchill—which have been translated into 23 languages.

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Napoleon Bonaparte

• Occupation: Emperor of France
• Born: August 15, 1769 at Ajaccio, Corsica, France
• Died: May 5, 1821 at St. Helena, United Kingdom
• Best known for: A brilliant military commander, conquered much of Europe
• Nickname: Little Corporal

• Napoleon is famous for being fairly short, probably 5 feet 6 inches tall. However, he would have been average height during the time period that he lived.
• Today, when someone seems to be overcompensating for being short they are said to have a "Napoleon complex."
• His birth name was Napoleone di Buonaparte. He changed the name to be more French when he moved to mainland France.
• He married his first wife, Josephine, in 1796. She became the first Empress of France, but he divorced her in 1810 and married Marie-Louise of Austria.
• The famous composer Beethoven was going to dedicate his 3rd Symphony to Napoleon, but changed his mind after Napoleon crowned himself emperor.
• He wrote a romance novel called Clisson et Eugenie.
• Listen to a recorded reading of this page:

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The life of Napoleon I: a timeline for 6 years old +

1769 – Birth of Napoleon Bonaparte

On 15 August 1769, Napoleon Bonaparte was born in Ajaccio, in Corsica, into a aristocratic family. He parents, Charles and Letizia already had one son, called Joseph. There would eventually be five boys (Joseph, Napoleon, Lucien, Louis and Jerome) and three girls (Elisa, Caroline and Pauline) in the family. Napoleon was mischievous and disruptive and was often told-off, but even from an early age, he enjoyed learning.

Did you know … that Corsica became part of France just before Napoleon was born? It had previously been controlled by the Genoan Republic, in Italy. Napoleon’s first words were Italian! Today, you can still visit the house where Napoleon was born, which has become a museum.

1779 – A future general

When he was ten years-old, Napoleon left Corsica to go to military school in Brienne (near Auxerre). This was a school reserved for boys from aristocratic families. Napoleon read a lot, especially history books, and he was good at mathematics as well. He did not have many friends though, and his classmates made fun of his Corsican accent. When he was fifteen, he moved to the military school in Paris. He was to become an officer and command soldiers. At school he wore a uniform and learnt to use weapons and ride a horse. Once he had completed his education, he was sent to join his new regiment in the south of France.

Item . This is the compass that Napoleon used whilst at school. He used it to get his bearings and find his position on a map: the needle always points north. (Napoleon Bonaparte’s compass at Brienne military school, Musée de Malmaison © RMN)

1796 – The Première Campagne d’Italie

The young general Bonaparte was sent to Italy. The army that he commanded was exhausted and lacked uniforms, ammunition and food. Napoleon knew how to motivate his troops, though, and he won many victories, including at Arcola, Rivoli. The peace treaty was signed in 1797.

Portrait . The painter Jean-Antoine Gros chose to depict his subject in motion: Napoleon’s left hand is grasping the flag and he is looking over his right-shoulder, ready to lead his army into battle! (Painting: J.A. Gros, General Bonaparte on the Arcola Bridge, 17 November 1796 [detail], Musée du château de Versailles © RMN

1798 – The expedition to Egypt

In 1798, Napoleon was sent by his government to… Egypt! The expedition was top-secret: the troops left from different ports and the soldiers did not initially know where they were going. The French won some battles, but the heat, the desert, thirst and long marches tired out the soldiers. Napoleon eventually had to return to Paris with some of his troops.

Did you know… that Napoleon also took a number of scientists and scholars with him on the expedition? They brought back drawings of animals, trees, flowers and monuments such as the pyramids. Everything was published in a large, many-volume book called ‘La Description de l’Egypte’ (‘The Description of Egypt’). (Painting: J.A. Gros, Napoleon Bonaparte haranguing the army before the battle of the Pyramids, 21 July 1798, Musée du Château de Versailles © RMN)

1799 – Napoleon takes power!

Returning to Paris, Napoleon took power. This event is known as the coup d’état du 18 Brumaire (from 1783 to 1806, the ‘Republican’ calendar was used. The date 18 brumaire corresponds with 9 November of our calendar). Napoleon introduced a new government (the Consulate) and moved into the Palais des Tuileries, near to the Louvre. He worked hard with ministers to modernise France: during the Consulate period (1799-1804), he created the Banque de France, the Légion d’honneur, the Code Civil and reformed the school system.

Portrait . Napoleon Bonaparte in a civilian dresscoat of red velvet: the onlooker’s eye is immediately drawn to the figure by this bright, vibrant colour. Napoleon is standing next to his desk, pointing to a text, probably the details of a law. The painter depicts Bonaparte as a statesman and moderniser of France. (Painting: J.A.D. Ingres. First Consul Bonaparte [detail] © DR)

1800 – The Deuxième Campagne d’Italie

Napoleon had to confront Austria, a country which could not accept him as leader of France. To take the enemy by surprise, Napoleon and his army, including canons, ammunition and horses, crossed the Alps. During the month of May there is a lot of snow, and the Austrians could not believe it! Napoleon won a decisive battle at Marengo on 14 June 1800, and the Austrians were defeated.

Portrait . Napoleon cheated a bit in asking the painter David to represent him as a majestic figure on the back of a proud white horse. In reality, Napoleon crossed the Alps on the back of a mule, an animal better suited to the narrow mountain paths. (The First Consul crossing the Alps at the Great St. Bernard Pass, Musée du Château de Malmaison © RMN)

1803 – The Musée Napoléon, the greatest museum in the world!

In 1792, the Musée Central des Arts was opened in the Palais du Louvre. It was to bring together the greatest works of art and sculpture so that the general public could admire them. Young artists would also go along to improve their technique by copying the paintings and pictures. In 1803, the museum was renamed the Musée Napoléon. Museums were also created in the provinces, in Lyon, Bordeaux and Marseilles.

Did you know … that the works that were displayed in the museum were bought, or often just taken from the museums of France’s conquered enemies? When Napoleon abdicated in 1815, many of the works were returned to their country of origin. (Painting: B. Zix, Foreign visitors to the Museum National [detail], Musée du Louvre © RMN)

1804 – Napoleon I’s coronation

On 2 December 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned Emperor of the French in the cathédrale Notre-Dame in Paris. He took the name Napoleon I. His wife Joséphine was also crowned Empress. The pope made a special journey from Rome to attend the grand ceremony, which lasted for more than five hours.

Did you know… that Napoleon commissioned the painter Jacques-Louis David to create a huge painting of the ceremony? The painting is more than nine metres long, over six metres in height, and includes over 190 figures. You can see it at the Musée du Louvre, in Paris. (Painting: J.L. David, The Coronation of Emperor Napoleon I and the crowning of the Empress Joséphine in the church of Notre Dame de Paris, 2 December 1804 [detail], Musée du château de Versailles © RMN )

1805 – The victory at Austerlitz

The kings of France’s neighbouring countries joined forces to attack Napoleon. However, Napoleon and his Grande Armée (French Imperial army) won a number of important victories, such as that at Austerlitz on 2 December 1805 (now part of the Czech Republic). Between 1805 and 1810, Napoleon won many battles and extended his empire in Europe.

Did you know… that the soldiers in the army were conscripted? Every young man between 20 and 25 had to be ready to fight, and soldiers were drawn by lot at random. They would often be away on campaign for many years.

Painting : On the battlefield, Napoleon was easily recognisable in his famous black, two-horned hat, a green uniform and a large grey overcoat. (Lejeune, Napoleon I’s bivouac, the eve of the battle of Austerlitz [detail], Musée du château de Versailles © RMN)

1810 – A new empress!

In 1796, Napoleon had married Joséphine de Beauharnais, but they did not have any children. As a result, Napoleon divorced Joséphine because she could not give him the son he wanted to create a dynasty (a family that reigns over France from father to son). Napoleon remarried on 2 April 1810, taking the princess Marie-Louise as his wife. She was the daughter of the emperor of Austria, Francis I. A year later, in 1811, Napoleon and Marie-Louise became the parents of a little boy, named Napoleon-François-Charles-Joseph. He was given the title of ‘King of Rome’.

Painting : Marie-Louise is welcomed by the young ladies at court. Napoleon and the girls watch the young lady, dressed in red. Even though she is not at the centre of the painting, she is certainly the most important figure in the scene. (P. Auzou, Arrival of the Archduchess Marie-Louise at Compiègne [detail], Musée du château de Versailles © RMN)

1812 – War with Russia

In 1812, Napoleon left France again to go to war with Tzar Alexander I, the emperor of Russia. He got as far as Moscow, but the cold (often dropping below -20 degrees Celsius!), hunger and the long distances travelled exhausted the soldiers. It was a big failure and Napoleon was unable to force the Tzar to sign a peace treaty. Napoleon and his troops had to return to France.

Did you know… the French word ‘la Bérézina’ is still used today to refer to a catastrophic failure or anything that has not gone as as they would have liked. The Berezina is a Russian river that the French forces had great difficulty crossing during their retreat from Russia.

Return from Russia © Fondation Napoléon

1814 – Napoleon is defeated and the end of the empire

France was invaded by Napoleon’s enemies. He led a final campaign against the invaders, known as the ‘Campagne de France’. It was the first time for a long while that war had taken place in France itself. Despite a few victories, Napoleon abandoned power (called ‘abdicating’) on 6 April 1814, at Fontainebleau. The victors sent him into exile on a little island near to Italy, called the island of Elba. His mother Letizia and his sister Pauline also accompanied him there. But the island was too small for Napoleon, the emperor who had ruled over a great empire…

Portrait : The painter represents Napoleon seated, his shoulders hunched, tired and distraught after his defeat. The emperor is defeated and his empire has come to an end. This painting is on display in the Musée de l’Armée in Paris. (Painting: Delaroche, Napoleon I at Fontainebleau, 31 March 1814 [detail], Musée de l’armée © RMN)

1815 – Napoleon’s return to Paris!

What a surprise! Napoleon escaped from the island of Elba and returned to France to retake power. The French were happy to see the return of their hero, particularly as the king, Louis XVIII, who replaced Napoleon, was not very popular. However, the neighbouring countries declared war on France again and Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, in Belgium, on 18 June 1815. He was forced to abdicate for a second time.

Did you know … that we call this short period between Napoleon’s return to Paris and his defeat at Waterloo ‘ les Cent-Jours ‘ (the hundred days)? This is because he was in power for roughly one hundred days before being defeated. (Painting: Sanders, The return from the island of Elba , Musée du château de Malmaison © RMN)

1821 – Exile on the island of St. Helena

Accompanied by several friends, Napoleon was exiled to a small, faraway island called the island of St. Helena. This time he was very closely watched by the English (after all, he had escaped the last time!). Napoleon lived in a very damp and dark house. He rode his horse a bit and read a lot, but he was very unhappy on the island and missed his family terribly. Napoleon died on 5 May 1821.

Did you know… Napoleon dictated the memoirs of his reign, the battles and the people that he met whilst on the island? The memoirs are known as the ‘Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène’.

Painting : Napoleon, all alone on a rocky outcrop, looks out to sea. In painting a very simple landscape, with nothing happening, and one single figure, the painter emphasises Napoleon’s feelings of solitude. ( Napoleon on St. Helena , Musée du château de Malmaison © RMN)

1840 – Napoleon is buried in Paris, 15 December

The French were devastated by the news of Napoleon’s death. His veteran soldiers remembered with fondness their general and loved to tell tales about their great victories. The king, Louis-Philippe, decided to have Napoleon’s body brought back to France. On 15 December 1840, Napoleon was buried in the crypt of the church of Saint-Louis des Invalides.  Thousands of French people as well as foreign visitors attended this special ceremony.

Photo : Napoleon’s Tomb at Les Invalides  © Fondation Napoléon

Timeline by Emmanuelle Papot and Irène Delage ; translation by Peter Hicks, 2008

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Napoleon's biography 1. The Youth of Napoleone

Napoleon was born on August 15th, 1769 in Ajaccio   Ajaccio , Corsica, the younger son of Carlo Bonaparte , a lawyer of the Supreme Council of Corsica, and Letizia Ramolino . He was baptized in    Inside the Ajaccio Cathedral the cathedral    The Ajaccio Cathedral of the city on July 21st, 1771, the year the Bonaparte family was given its noble status by the Board of Corsica.

The young Napoleon made his first trip to France in December 1778. He was admitted the following January 1st to the college of Autun, Burgundy, where his father had registered him after having obtained a scholarship. In May 1779, Napoleon joined the military school of Brienne    Military School of Brienne , which prepared children of the nobility for a military career. He demonstrated a remarkable aptitude for mathematics.

He left this institution in October 1784 to enter the Royal Military School    Military School of Paris of Champ-de-Mars in Paris in the Company of gentlemen cadets.

The year 1785 was a sad one for Napoleon, as he mourned the death of his father Charles, probably of stomach cancer, leaving a widow with eight children and little income. In the fall, Napoleon received his wings of second Lieutenant and was assigned to the artillery regiment of La Fere, stationed at Valence, Rhone Valley.

In 1786, his first leave saw him off to Corsica, which he had left nearly eight years ago. He returned to Paris the following year.

In June 1788, Lieutenant Bonaparte rejoined his regiment, stationed at Auxonne, a small town in Burgundy. In 1789, troubled year, he was responsible for suppressing riots in the region, and then returned to Corsica, where he participated in the political turmoil that was stiring the island. He demonstrated at the time an insular nationalism, supporting the action of Pasquale Paoli , with whom he had an inconclusive interview in July 1790.

Back in Auxonne, Napoleon was promoted to first Lieutenant in June 1791 and transferred to the 4th Artillery Regiment in Valence. On the occasion of a new leave, he joined a battalion of National Guard of Ajaccio, with which he took part in the clashes, which forced him to return to Paris in May 1792 to defend himself. He was reinstated in the army in July 1792 with the rank of Captain and sent to Ajaccio.

His break with Pasquale Paoli, whose supporters had ransacked Bonaparte's house, forced him to flee the island with his family in June 1793. While his family was moving towards Toulon, he joined his regiment in Nice. After a mission in Avignon, he was appointed by the National Convention in command of artillery in Toulon, Provence, with the rank of Battalion chief. Under the command of General Jacques Dugommier , Napoleon took a decisive part in the expulsion of the English fleet with his talent as a gunner. He fought alongside future marshals and generals of the Empire, as Auguste Viesse de Marmont , Jean-Andoche Junot , André Masséna , Louis-Gabriel Suchet and Claude-Victor Perrin . He was rewarded for his great deeds with the rank of Brigadier general.

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Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte, also known as Napoleon I, was a French general and emperor who conquered large parts of Europe in the 19th century. 

Famed for his tactical brilliance and quick thinking in desperate situations, he went down in European history as one of the foremost military strategists of the time.

This article will be of immense use for candidates preparing for the Civil Services examination .

Some important world history-related articles are linked below:

Early Life of Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte was born in Corsica, an island located on the Mediterranean Coast, on August 15, 1768,  to Carlo Bonaparte and Letizia Romalino Bonaparte. Despite being part of the Corsican nobility, Napoleon’s family were of modest means. 

Napoleon did his schooling in mainland France, graduating from the military academy in 1785. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant of an artillery detachment in the French Army. He was on leave when the French Revolution broke out in 1789, during which he became involved with the Corsican branch  of the Jacobins , one of many pro-democratic parties in France at the time. At the time, the Bonaparte family had gotten into a dispute for their pro-democratic leanings with the monarchy supporting the governor of Corsica. The result was them fleeing Corsica for mainland France in 1793, where Napoleon returned to active military duty

Napoleon came into contact with Augustine Robespierre, the brother of the infamous Maximilien Robespierre. Maximilien Robespierre would herald the Reign of Terror, a period of anarchy marked by violence against and execution of those considered the enemies of the French revolution .

But when the Robespierre brothers fell from power and were guillotined in July 1794, Napoleon was placed under house arrest for a brief period of time due to his association with them. In 1795, he suppressed a monarchy-backed uprising against the revolutionary government, being promoted to a major general as a result.

Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte

The French government was fighting against other European monarchies since 1792. In a series of battles taking place in Italy during 1796, Napoleon led a French army to victory over the much better equipped and larger armies of Austria. The Treaty of Campo Formio signed between France and Austria led to territorial gains for France.

The Directory, a five-member group that governed France since the Reign of Terror ended in 1795, directed Napoleon to lead an invasion of Great Britain. Knowing the French Navy was inadequate to deal with the far more superior British Royal Navy, Napoleon instead proposed an expedition to Egypt, then a British Protectorate. Taking Egypt from the British would effectively cut them off from their vital trade with India, causing widespread economic hardship on the British Isle. Landing in Egypt in 1798, the French army won the Battle of the Pyramids in June of that year.

But during the Battle of the Nile in August, the French Navy was nearly wiped out following the engagement with the British Navy. Later, Napoleon would launch an invasion of Syria in 1798. Syria was then a province of the Ottoman Empire. This campaign would be a failure as well.

With the political situation in France deteriorating, Napoleon decided to return to France. He then became part of the group that overthrew the Directory in 1799.

Now a three-member group called the Consulate ruled France with Napoleon becoming first consul, a position consolidated by his victory over Austria at the Battle of Marengo in June 1800.

To know what are the important events in world history from 3000 BC to 1950 AD , visit the linked article.

Napoleon I, Emperor of France

A constitutional amendment made in 1802 made Napoleon first consul for life. In 1804, he crowned himself, emperor of France, during a lavish ceremony at the Cathedral of Notre Dame

Seeking to restore stability in post-revolutionary France, he centralized the government by introducing reforms in banking and education, supporting science and art. His most significant accomplishment was the creation of the Napoleonic Code, which transformed the French legal system and continues to be the be basis of the legal system in France and most of Western Europe to this day.

The Napoleonic Wars broke out in 1803, lasting until 1815. It was a series of conflicts between the French Empire and a coalition of European nations.

On October 1805, the French fleet was annihilated during the battle of Trafalgar, nullifying the threat of invasion of the British Isles. The Battle of Austerlitz in December of that year, however, solidified his reputation as one of the greatest generals in European History.  A combined army of Austrians and Russians was defeated by the French and the termination of the Holy  Roman Empire that resulted would be a catalyst for the unification of Germany in 1871

Seeking to defeat his British rivals through economic means, Napoleon devised the Continental System in 1806, which blockaded Europeans ports from British Trade. Subsequent victories in 1807 and 1809 against the Russians and Austrians resulted in French territorial gains in central and Eastern Europe

Visit the linked article to get tips on how to study world history for UPSC Mains

Fall of Napoleon Bonaparte

The Russian withdrawal from the continental system gave Napoleon  casus belli for Napoleon to launch an invasion of Russia in the summer of 1812. It proved to be a costly mistake as the Russians switched to scorched-earth tactics to deny the French army any hope of preparing for the brutal winter that would follow. By September of that year, both sides had suffered enormous casualties.

The French Army did eventually take Moscow but all they found was an empty city, with its population having evacuated further east. Seeing little point in residing in Moscow, Napoleon retreated back towards the west under constant attack by the Russians. Only 100,000 of the original 600,000 managed to reach the safety of the empire.

Solve previous years history questions for UPSC Mains , visit the linked article.

Further setbacks for Napoleon awaited him with the defeat of his armies in Spain. Napoleon’s forces were again defeated in 1813 during the Battle of Leipzig by a coalition force of Austrian, Prussian, Russian and Swedish troops. He was forced to abdicate his throne when the coalition forces captured Paris. He was exiled to the island of Elba off the coast of Italy while his wife and son were sent to Austria

On February 26, 1815, Napoleon escaped to mainland France, where he was welcomed to Paris by cheering crowds. He began a campaign to reconquer lost French possessions in Europe shortly after. 

The French Army invaded Belgium in 1815 in order to defeat a combined British and Prussian army. In the engagement that followed the Prussians were defeated at Ligny but on June 18, at the Battle of Waterloo, the  French were crushed by the British through Prussian support. The battle permanently ended Napoleon’s threat to Europe.

In June 1815, Napoleon was dethroned once again.

Napoleon Bonaparte: UPSC Notes – Download PDF Here

Final years of Napoleon Bonaparte

In October 1815, Napoleon was exiled to Saint Helena, a remote island in the South Atlantic Ocean. He passed away while there on May 5, 1821. He was 51 at the time. The likely cause of his demise is said to be stomach cancer, although it was speculated with no sufficient evidence that he was poisoned. Although his last wish was to be buried on the banks of the Seine, he was buried on the island. In 1840 his remains were returned to France and given a state funeral. 

Frequently Asked Questions  about Napoleon Bonaparte

Why is napoleon famous, who defeated napoleon.

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Ridley Scott Already Made His Best Napoleon Movie 47 Years Ago

• The Duellists explores the Napoleonic Wars through compelling characters, proving to be a more successful narrative than Napoleon.
• Contrasting with Napoleon's linear approach, The Duellists effectively uses time jumps to reveal character motivations over 16 years.
• The Duellists' success highlights Napoleon's missed potential, showing how Ridley Scott could have created a more spectacular film.

Ridley Scott's Napoleon was an ambitious attempt by the director to tell the full story of the French emperor's dramatic life, but the truth is that he had already made a much more cohesive movie set in the same period nearly five decades earlier. Spanning several decades, from Bonaparte's involvement in the French Revolution to his eventual death on the tiny Atlantic island of Saint Helena, Napoleon had an epic scope – even by the standards of most biopics. However, while the story failed to come together in one cohesive narrative, a previous Scott project proves how things could have been different.

While it was by no means a disaster, Ridley Scott's historical epic was not the triumph many fans were hoping for. Made for a budget of between $130 and $200 million, Napoleon made $221 million at the box office . Critical responses were often just as muted as the audience reaction, with the film holding 57% on aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, based on 333 reviews. Although the movie represents Scott's only attempt at telling Bonaparte's life story , another of his movies set in the same period shows how he could have better handled the subject.

The Duellists Is Ridley Scott's Original 'Napoleon' Movie

It's set during the napoleonic wars.

Despite not being about the same character, Ridley Scott's 1977 directorial debut, The Duellists , is the director's first true Napoleon movie. Set in France during the Napoleonic Wars, the movie follows the fortunes of two contrasting officers – the aristocratic Armand d'Hubert (Keith Carradine) and the boorish Bonapartist Gabriel Feraud (Harvey Keitel). Initially clashing over a perceived sleight, the pair are brought together time and time again over the coming decades, as their initial duel spirals into a story of obsession and violence.

Napoleon Cast & Character Guide: Everyone Joining Joaquin Phoenix In Ridley Scott's History Epic

Although Napoleon himself is not a presence in The Duellists , he is perhaps the dominant background figure in the narrative. Feraud's obsession with Bonaparte partly explains his antipathy towards d'Hubert – whose aristocratic heritage immediately marks him out as an anti-revolutionary. Each of the duo's meetings is also defined by the major Napoleonic campaigns of the day, with the story beginning in 1800 and encompassing the Russian campaign of 1812, Bonaparte's exile in 1814 , and the aftermath of the Hundred Days campaign. While d'Hubert and Feraud are the key protagonists, The Duellists is undoubtedly a " Napoleon " movie.

Ridley Scott's The Duellists Is A Better Movie Than Napoleon

Its characters and story make it more successful.

Even though the two films take very different approaches to the period, The Duellists is more successful as a cohesive narrative. The dynamic between d'Hubert and Feraud is an extremely compelling narrative device , with the Napoleonic Wars backdrop providing an evocative period setting. Even though the story features multiple time jumps, neither the relationship between the two men nor the wider story ever feels confused – the growth and development of both characters makes perfect sense within the context of the story.

Both Napoleon and The Duellists showcase director Ridley Scott's ability to capture powerful and evocative visuals, giving the action scenes an epic sense of scale. However, while Napoleon features vast battle scenes and boasts a budget in the hundreds of millions, The Duellists is more remarkable for the fact that it was made for just $900,000, with set pieces that typically revolve around just two main players. The fact that Scott still managed to make The Duellists' fight scenes feel just as epic as anything in Napoleon makes the 1977 movie an even more impressive achievement.

The Duellists Fixes Napoleon's Biggest Problems

Its timeframe is handled much more effectively.

While Scott's handling of The Duellist s ' characters and fight scenes is impressive, where the movie provides the most interesting comparison to Napoleon is in how it approaches a decades-long story. In Napeleon , Scott takes a linear chronological approach , trying to cram in all the major events from Napoleon's life into two-and-a-half hours. The result of this is that, while major events like the siege of Toulon, his coronation as emperor, and the Battle of Austerlitz are all ticked off, the story behind these seminal events is completely lost. So too are Napoleon's more nuanced motives – it's as though major events just happen to him.

Napoleon Ending Explained

By contrast, The Duellists is unafraid to use major jumps forward in time. Although the story spans 16 years, the period is covered by seven separate vignettes that individually reveal all the audience needs to know about the protagonists' motivations and backstories and collectively come together to give the audience a better sense of the ebbs and flows of Bonaparte's reign than Napoleon ever manages. What this proves is that the key to telling a successful Napoleon story is not simply showing the major events themselves. It's about following characters whose growth can inform the bigger picture.

...by trying to simultaneously do justice to the complete history of Bonaparte's life and explore these complicated ideas, ( Napoleon ) falls short

In both d'Hubert and Feraud, The Duellists has a pair of leads who help the movie explore themes of ambition, pride, obsessiveness, arrogance, and even romance . Each of these is a subject that Napoleon also tries to address. However, by trying to simultaneously do justice to the complete history of Bonaparte's life and explore these complicated ideas, the film falls short in both areas. As The Duellists proves, the most compelling way to tell a story set in the Napoleonic Wars – even one about Bonaparte himself – is to ensure the main characters are compelling before worrying about the action.

The Duellists Proves Napoleon Was A Missed Opportunity

The 1977 movie proves how great napoleon could have been.

The Duellists ' success relative to Napoleon is a frustrating reminder that the 2023 movie really could have been something great. Both films make it clear that Ridley Scott has an uncanny ability to bring this particular period of history to life. The Duellists was nearly universally praised on release for its authenticity and accurate portrayal of contemporary costumes and customs. Likewise, Napoleon was nominated for Best Production Design and Best Costume Design at the Academy Awards – even if other aspects of its historical accuracy, such as Napoleon's personality, were criticized.

The Duellists is available to rent from Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime Video

Given that Scott was previously so effective at recreating Napoleonic France on a comparatively microscopic budget, Napoleon could have provided an epic sense of scale the director could only have dreamed of back in 1977. Had the film taken The Duellists ' gripping storytelling and compelling characters and combined them with its impressive budget, the end result could have been spectacular. Unfortunately, as a result of its misguided approach to the subject, Napoleon will always be considered the second best of Ridley Scott's Napoleonic movies.

Director Ridley Scott

Release Date November 22, 2023

Cast Joaquin Phoenix, Ludivine Sagnier, Ben Miles, Vanessa Kirby

Runtime 158 Minutes